Few Chinese heroic tales have captured the global imagination quite like Journey to the West. The 16th-century novel, which follows the pilgrimage of a Buddhist monk and his three disciples—the invincible Monkey King (Wukong), the slow-witted Pigsy and the ever-loyal fish spirit Sandy—has been adapted and reimagined endlessly across stage, page and screen. Its modern legacy stretches from the namesake 1986 television series, still China's most-rerun drama, and Dragon Ball, the Japanese manga that re-cast Wukong as a spiky-haired alien hero, to Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow's cult fantasy comedy A Chinese Odyssey and Black Myth: Wukong, one of the biggest gaming phenomena of 2024.

The epic's latest cinematic reinterpretation, Nobody, however, derails from this heroic lineage by turning the story on its head. Instead of tracking the fabled four on their noble quest for the sacred scrolls, this Chinese animated film produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) follows a ragtag group of demons who pose as the legendary quartet by embarking on their own journey to the West.

At the helm is a pig demon, a minor sidekick in the service of one of the many monster kings eager to devour the monk. When a workplace mishap earns him a death sentence, he devises a wild escape: to disguise himself as Pigsy and set off on a mock pilgrimage together with a toad demon disguised as the monk, a gorilla demon playing Wukong and a weasel demon enlisted as Sandy.

Produced on a relatively modest budget estimated at no more than 65 million yuan ($9.2 million), the film nevertheless became one of the summer's biggest breakout hits. According to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan, as of November 11, it had taken in more than 1.7 billion yuan ($240 million) since its release on August 2, which makes it the highest-grossing 2D animation in Chinese box-office history.

And its story doesn't end there. Starting in November, the film began its global rollout, premiering in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia on November 6 and in North America on November 7.

While its overseas journey has only just begun, Nobody has already proved that underdogs can rewrite familiar myths, that even a small story drawn from the margins of a tale as old as Journey to the West can stake out fresh territory in today's creative landscape.

Off the beaten path

For Yu Shui, the film's director, Nobody is less an adaptation than an extension—an attempt to explore the untold life of the countless dark creatures who flit through the original tale's shadows without ever being named.

"In the original novel, these demons were lumped together as xiaodemen—the little ones—figures brushed aside as irrelevant," Yu told Southern Weekend, a Chinese newsweekly. "But I've always wondered: Do they have families, frustrations and workplace anxieties? It's precisely their stories we wanted to tell."

This shift of focus from heroes to underdogs has struck a chord with Chinese viewers, who see echoes of their own everyday struggles in the film's motley collection of misfits and have-nots.

As one viral hashtag put it: "There's a little pig demon in every one of us." To many, the pig demon is that kid who leaves his or her rural hometown for the big city, only to find that hard work alone does not guarantee reward—yet who still chooses to stay hopeful; the toad demon speaks to the wave of young people flocking to government jobs, drawn by the promise of lifetime job security; the gorilla demon is every introvert forced to become extrovert simply because it is expected; and the once-chatty weasel, who trains himself into silence to play the stoic Sandy, embodies the young workers who slowly lose their spark as office life grinds them down.

One scene that has sparked particularly intense debate comes at the end, where the four antiheroes, having exhausted all their cultivated powers to protect a village from a tyrannical demon king, revert to their original animal forms.

Some see a tragic ending, one where the little demons' efforts change nothing in the grand scheme. "The world, it seems, remains one where glory is reserved for the chosen few," a comment on review platform Douban lamented.

Yet others spot a quiet triumph. "The film presents a different kind of heroism, which is not about becoming somebody, but about choosing to stick it out despite realizing you may always be a nobody," another Douban comment read.

The director offers a similar interpretation. "You may think you've escaped one mountain, only to find yourself facing a bigger one," Yu said. "The film doesn't promise a full escape. It simply celebrates the act of trying."

Lost and found

Beyond its resonance with today's young strivers, Nobody also taps into another sentiment: a nostalgia for a lost golden age of Chinese animation—one where SAFS ruled supreme. On Chinese social media, users have rallied under the trending slogan, "SAFS is back," trading recollections of how the studio's hand-drawn classics profoundly shaped their childhood and adolescence.

Founded in 1957, the studio was once internationally renowned for pioneering the Chinese school of animation, an artistic style that fuses Chinese aesthetics, techniques and cultural materials to forge a distinctly Chinese identity in animated film-making.

For several decades, the studio succeeded in fulfilling that mission. In the early 1960s, it saw the release of Havoc in Heaven, China's first feature-length animated film in color, adapted from the opening chapters of Journey to the West. With a new visual vocabulary that blends Peking opera, Tang Dynasty (618-907) art and folk traditions, it went on to win numerous international awards and is widely credited with putting Chinese animation on the global map.

Around the same time, the studio developed what became its signature style, which blends classical ink painting with modern animation. This tradition began with Little Tadpoles Looking for Mama (1960), the world's first ink-painting animated film, and culminated in the 1980s with the release of Feeling From Mountain and Water (1988), which is considered both the crowning jewel of the genre and its swan song.

The decline of the genre ran parallel to the gradual waning of SAFS in the 1980s and 1990s, when television became a household staple and flooded audiences with Hollywood imports like Mickey Mouse and The Smurfs, alongside Japanese anime such as Sailor Moon and Slam Dunk. SAFS's hand-drawn films, by contrast, were too costly to keep up.

By the time Monkey King: Hero Is Back (2015) and Nezha: Birth of the Demon Child (2019) ushered in a new era of commercially successful animated features in China, SAFS had become largely irrelevant to the Chinese film scene.

Nobody, however, shows a way out. The film was built on the first episode of Yao-China Folktales, an eight-part web series co-produced by SAFS and Bilibili, China's YouTube equivalent, which has amassed more than 350 million views on the platform since its 2023 release.

While retaining the web series' hallmark formula of using fantasy to tell stories with everyday resonance, the film also carries forward its effort to revive the studio's long-lost ink-painting animation tradition. Over four years, more than 600 artists created a visual style that merges the coloring techniques of traditional ink painting with Western art's emphasis on depth and realism.

This artistic choice is both a tribute to the golden era of Chinese animation and a testament to the enduring influence it holds over a new tribe of young Chinese filmmakers.

"We were raised on SAFS films," recalled Chen Liaoyu, the film's producer, who was among the first batch of Chinese undergraduates to study animation at the Beijing Film Academy in the 1990s. Many from that cohort would go on to become the mainstays of today's creative industry. "The imprint of that bygone age runs deep in everything we create," Chen said.

Yet tradition is not the only force shaping this generation, whose early exposure to foreign animated films has attuned them to a more commercially minded approach to animation.

For years, the Chinese film industry has been criticized for relying too heavily on box-office revenue, whereas many of Disney's successful brands derive a large share of their income from franchise licensing. Nobody charted a different path from its domestic predecessors. From the outset, a dedicated team of franchise incubators were involved to help shape the script and design the characters. To date, the film has partnered with more than 30 brands to launch over 400 licensed products, which has generated nearly 250 million yuan ($35 million) in merchandise sales.

A few months ago, the studio announced that a sequel will be released next summer. Whether Nobody can truly grow into an enduring franchise is yet to be seen, but in keeping with the film's core message, what ultimately matters is not whether one reaches its destination, but the act of trying itself. BR

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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