“Jonathan Clements, author of Anime: A History, cautioned that over-production of films could unpleasantly shock studios and investors. ‘Animation consumers are themselves a resource that needs to be carefully managed,’ he said.”

Over at CNBC, I’m one of Evelyn Cheng’s interviewees as she ponders the success of Ne Zha 2, officially the biggest selling animated film in history, although most of those sales are in a single territory, its Chinese homeland. She came to me because of the chapter on the relationship between anime and China in my book, which predicted the shedding of Japanese links as China pursued cultural and industrial autarky in the animation sector.

Ne Zha 2 marks the culmination of the 2020 “Five Year Plan for the Film Industry”, which proclaimed a demand for a “strong film nation” (dianying qiangguo), all the better to aid “digitial ingestion, cloudification and intelligent upgrading of the entire film industry chain.” This doesn’t just mean the movies themselves, but the vertically integrated media mix (as the Japanese call it), of merchandise, spinoffery and cultural tourism. For a long time, in this regard, as I said in 2017, China was “rediscovering the wheel while ignoring the cart.” When your film is entirely made in-country, is about a Chinese subject, features Chinese locations and Chinese products, that entire chain is folded in domestically. It helps if your market is so heavily protected that foreign films don’t get much of a look-in.

Although there’s a lot of vainglorious talk of Ne Zha taking the world by storm, so far this is the very antithesis of the former bold plans for globalisation of Chinese film. Someone has worked out that you don’t need a hallowed world-beating franchise; in a market as big as China, you just need to find your local audience. Cheng’s article contains some interesting comments in the ongoing argument about film culture, including a production house in Beijing that ignores the vast size of China’s domestic potential market, and instead targets specific audiences of a mere 30 million people…. so…. trying to appeal to a footprint roughly the size of Saudi Arabia or Peru or Australia, not the whole massiveness of Chinese society.