Inspired by household folklore about two snake spirits, the film made in association with Warner Brothers has earned 470 million yuan ($72.8 million) at the box office and accumulated 550 million "clicks" from online subscribers.
Zhao teamed up with director Amp Wong to work on White Snake in early 2016. But in keeping with Light Chaser's timeline－one new film a year－Zhao also started brainstorming about Nezha.
The first script of Nezha Reborn is also set in ancient China and retains many of the original story's elements. However, Zhao says he felt such a retelling would be stereotypical.
"I wanted to find something to make me excited," the director says, describing himself as a "rebellious and wild" person.
Despite keeping the setting in ancient China and retaining the essential plot of the 1979 film Prince Nezha's Triumph Against the Dragon King as a salute to the classic, the new film unfolds around severe tension between the rich and poor.
Nezha's foe for millennia, the dragon, is reincarnated as a tapwater plant tycoon's son. When his family tries to monopolize the water, the protagonist Li accepts his responsibility to stop the threat after Nezha's superpower is awakened deep within him.
"Li possesses the superpower by accident. One of the core messages we want to convey through the film is about how an ordinary person could balance his personal life and duties when he suddenly becomes a hero," Zhao says.
An advance screening in January released a roughly 20-minute clip that impressed audiences with jaw-dropping special effects.
Nearly 1,000 artists worked for more than 1,300 days to animate 162 roles. Each took around 360 days to finish. And around 2,100 computers were used for rendering at the peak of the workload.
Special-effects scenes account for up to 1,838 of the film's 2,103 shots, or 87.4 percent of the entire runtime.
The major creators have traveled to Sikumen in Shanghai－a distinctive area where Western and Chinese architectural styles are blended－to seek inspiration for animating the bustling city of Donghai.
