Nobody

The God of Small Things

In the sprawling pantheon of Chinese mythology, the spotlight inevitably finds the Monkey King. He is the chaotic saint, the rebel god, the gold standard of heroism. But in Shui Yu’s exquisite animated feature *Nobody* (2025), the camera tilts downward, past the clouds and the glory, to the dirt where the forgotten things live. Expanding on his viral short from *Yao-Chinese Folktales*, Yu delivers a film that is nominally a fantasy adventure but spiritually a crushing yet tender portrait of the modern existential grind. It is a work of "mythic realism" that argues the greatest tragedy isn’t failing to become a god, but struggling to remain a person.



The visual language of *Nobody* is a rebellion against the hyper-polished, Pixar-adjacent 3D aesthetic that has dominated recent Chinese blockbusters like *Ne Zha*. Yu and the Shanghai Animation Film Studio return to their roots with a handcrafted 2D style that feels breathable and tactile. The ink-wash backgrounds don't just serve as scenery; they create a sense of scale that swallows the protagonists whole. When the little Pig demon stands on the precipice of Langlang Mountain, the negative space around him isn't just artistic prowess—it’s narrative isolation. The animation moves with a fluid, almost erratic energy that mirrors the desperate, scrambling nature of its characters' lives.

At its heart, this is a story about the crushing weight of being an NPC (non-player character) in someone else's epic. The narrative follows a motley crew of low-level *yaoguai*—a pig, a toad, a weasel, and a gorilla—who, tired of being cannon fodder for the "real" heroes, decide to cosplay the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang Monk and his disciples. It is a pathetic, hilarious, and deeply moving charade. They are not the Monkey King; they are the temps hired to scrub his armor.



The film’s brilliance lies in how it recodes the high fantasy of *Journey to the West* into the mundane horror of the modern workplace. The Pig demon is not fighting celestial armies; he is fighting middle-management bureaucracy, arbitrary deadlines, and the crushing realization that his labor is disposable. The scene where the group attempts to "act" like the legendary heroes, only to be exposed by their own inherent smallness, is painful to watch because it is so recognizable. It captures the specific melancholy of the "dagong ren" (laborer)—the realization that the system was built for giants, and you were only ever meant to be the cobblestones they walk on.



Shui Yu avoids the trap of a hollow "believe in yourself" victory. The triumph in *Nobody* is not that these small monsters eventually become gods—they don't. The triumph is that they learn to survive the narrative that wants to erase them. By focusing on the "nobodies" who usually get one frame of screen time before being vanquished by Sun Wukong’s staff, the film reclaims dignity for the invisible majority. It suggests that while history is written by the victors, life is lived by the background extras. *Nobody* is a small masterpiece about the quiet heroism of refusing to be merely a footnote.