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China, US plan to make cartoon of Chinese folk hero Nezha in battle with Transformers

By Jiang Jie (People's Daily Online)    15:58, July 14, 2017

The Decepticons will meet a new opponent soon: Nezha, a Chinese folk hero with three heads and six arms who cannot be harmed by steel weapons.

The scene when the boy-sized Nezha fights a metallic Transformer is expected to hit the big screen soon, as China and the US are working together on creating a cartoon starring the two classic figures.

The announcement was unveiled on July 6 on the official website of China Central Television (CCTV). A statement said that Hasbro representatives and its CEO recently visited CCTV to discuss cooperation on project “Nezha and the Transformer,” which is marked as a milestone in Sino-US cartoon cooperation.

“Consensus has been reached on the production scale, time of airing, the ownership of the IP right and other legal matters,” said the statement, adding that both sides agreed to strengthen strategic cooperation partnership and further tap into the brand value of classic cartoons.

The announcement received a lot of attention, and many began to try to calculate Nezha’s chance of winning.

In Chinese folklore, Nezha was born into the family of a general in the Shang Dynasty. He was born in the shape of a ball after his mother’s three-year-and-six-month-long pregnancy. Nezha was later accepted by the immortal Taiyi Zhenren as a student. Nezha is depicted as a young boy who has the ability to fly on his “wind fire wheels.” His weapons include a spear and a special silk-like red rope that can grow back if cut or on Nezha’s order.

This also marks the first official project on classic cartoons. In the 1990s, several comic books were published in China, featuring Chinese cartoon characters battling against those from the US and Japan.

In one of them, the Decepticons were driven away from the Earth after losing a battle with Huluwa, or the Bottle Gourd Brothers. The seven brothers born out of bottle gourds have seven different special abilities, including invisibility and water or fire breathing. The brothers, however, won the battle with the help of a deity who equipped them with advanced weapons to defeat the Decepticons. 

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Web editor: Jiang Jie, Bianji)

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