THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CONFUCIAN ETHICS IN NEZHA: BIRTH OF THE DEMON CHILD

Abstract

Nezha: Birth of the Demon Child (2019) is a significant example of how contemporary popular cinema reconfigures traditional Chinese cultural resources. Previous studies have examined the film through perspectives such as mythology, adaptation, and cultural identity, they have paid limited attention to the reconstruction of Confucian ethics. This study examines this reconstruction through the Three Bonds and Five Constants as the analytical framework. Drawing on Confucian ethics, adaptation studies, and popular culture theory, the study employs film/cinematic analysis and intertextual analysis to examine the film’s narrative, characterization, dialogue, conflicts, and cinematic language in comparison with classical Confucian texts and Investiture of the Gods. The findings show that selected Confucian ethical relationships and virtues are reconfigured around individual characters, interpersonal relationships, emotional conflicts, and moral choices. The Three Bonds shift from a predominantly hierarchical and socially ordered framework toward interpersonal authority, parental responsibility, and familial cooperation, while the Five Constants are expressed through moral choice, compassion, normative conduct, discernment, and trust. The study identifies four major transformations: from political order to interpersonal relationships, from socially embedded moral norms to individual moral agency, from normative and philosophical conflict to emotionalized experience, and from abstract ethical concepts to cinematic embodiment. These transformations constitute a process of selective recontextualization through which inherited ethical resources are reorganized within contemporary cinematic forms. The study therefore proposes a preliminary model of ethical transformation based on contextual reconfiguration, interpersonalization, individualization, emotionalization, and cinematic embodiment.