Coco Cartoon: Harnessing Today's Tech to Retell the Ancient Tale of Ne Zha

The beginning of 2025 could be called a "Demon Child" moment.

Ne Zha 2 stormed onto the global stage, becoming the top-grossing animated film in the global box office history.

Clad in crimson and riding his Wind Fire Wheels, Ne Zha has been a staple figure of Chinese folklore for centuries, with a new retelling of his story arriving every generation or so, but rarely has Ne Zha had quite this much of an impact. This latest incarnation of Ne Zha was forged in the creative furnace of Coco Cartoon, in a process fueled by mountains of data.

Behind Every Dazzling Frame Lies a Reliable Storage Backbone

With over 2,400 shots, more than 1,900 special effects shots, and 10,000+ special effects elements, Ne Zha 2 is a truly breathtaking visual experience. Even the tiniest details—often unnoticed by the audience—reflect the team's relentless pursuit of perfection.

Just how refined is the visual quality of Ne Zha 2?

For example, when Ne Zha is struck by the heart-piercing curse, we can see the veins under his skin bulge and twitch. When light strikes Ao Bing's wall of ice, it is refracted out at 572 different angles. During the destruction of Chentang Pass, every nuance—the shattering roof tiles, the spurting lava, the billowing clothing of the fleeing townspeople—is rendered in breathtaking detail.

Later, in the climactic battle scene, the monsters from the Dragon Palace are not just copy-and-paste duplicates. Each general's costume, pattern, and weapon were uniquely designed, and each minor character was individually modeled and dynamically animated. The rendering data for just one character could fill ten disks.

Countless subtle details such as these come together to create the film's rich and immersive visual experience.

Each stage of production—from character modeling and texture mapping to scene construction and special effects rendering—is a highly data-intensive process that relies on real-time processing of vast amounts of data.

For example, crafting lifelike facial expressions and body movements requires meticulous 3D modeling. Scene design demands an intricate blend of environmental and lighting data. Special effects such as fire, flowing water, and smoke involve tens of millions of polygon elements and require complex physical simulations and computational rendering.

Such a stunning visual feast cannot be created without powerful data processing and storage capabilities.

So much of what goes into creating a first-rate visual experience—higher frame rate and resolution, wider color gamut—significantly increases the amount of data a studio has to deal with, beyond the raw material, the various intermediate processes further add to a production's data burden. If data storage is overwhelmed by the volume of read and write requests, animators sitting at their rendering workstations may find their work frustrated by freezes, while lack of storage capacity could derail a production entirely. Creating a work on the scale of Ne Zha 2 is time-consuming enough without technical delays.

In other words, the more vivid the image, the greater the demand placed on the underlying data infrastructure.

The production team behind Ne Zha 2 understood this well.

Just like Ne Zha needed his "Wind Fire Wheels" to do battle against the army from Jade Void Palace, Coco Cartoon needed second-to-none data storage to meet the enormous data storage and processing demands of their ambitious project.

Reinvigorating Mythology with Light and Shadow: Ne Zha's Three Magic Weapons and Lotus Rebirth

Ne Zha 2 is ultimately a tale of transformation and growth. He starts off as a boy, immature and lacking in confidence. After passing through the flames of the Samadhi True Fire and breaking free from the heart-piercing curse, he is physically and spiritually transformed—his baby fat replaced with lean muscle and his insecurities banished by the attainment on nirvana.

Similarly, for Coco Cartoon, the years-long quest to bring this story to the screen inevitably demanded a complete reshaping of its data infrastructure.

"The lights in our server room for Ne Zha 2 are always brighter than those in the Jade Void Palace," joked the technical director of Coco Cartoon. "The supporting characters in this film are animated in greater detail than even the protagonists of the previous one, so the volume of data generated is several times what it was last time around. A single frame requires handling up to 10 GB of data. Without a robust storage foundation, we could hardly take on such a challenge."

That robust foundation is Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage.

Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage gives Coco Cartoon three superpowers, much like Ne Zha's three magical weapons that grant him his powers.

Qiankun Ring: Elastic scalability.

Thanks to its fully symmetric scale-out architecture, OceanStor Pacific storage can be smoothly and linearly expanded to 4,096 nodes, accommodating future EB-level capacity growth. In addition, the elastic EC redundancy algorithm enables the storage system to dynamically adjust EC configuration as the cluster expands and the number of nodes increases, delivering excellent flexibility and reliability.

Fire-tipped Spear: Superior storage efficiency and performance.

With load-awareness capabilities and an intelligent prefetch algorithm, the storage system accurately identifies and loads data segments into the cache, achieving consistently ultra-high performance. Moreover, a single storage system supports both high-IOPS reading of tens of thousands of KB-level files during single-frame rendering, and high-bandwidth modifications of multiple GB-level files during multi-frame playback—delivering smooth production with no lag or dropped frames.

Red Sash: Seamless data mobility and adaptability.

The intelligent tiering technology of OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage enables data to move seamlessly between hot, warm, and cold data pools on demand. Furthermore, from 3D, AI, and cloud rendering to big data platforms and media asset libraries, Huawei OceanStor Pacific supports interworking of file, object, and HDFS protocols, ensuring that a single data copy meets the different access requirements of various platforms, with data flowing freely wherever needed.

When the "Demon Child" met OceanStor Pacific, a spectacular collision of art and technology unfolded.

The cinematography team set out to "Make the audience to believe that myths are real." After five years of relentless pursuit, they finally created a movie that met their exacting standards.

The team at Coco Cartoon, along with countless other animators, is dedicated to bringing Eastern storytelling and aesthetics to audiences everywhere.

When the work on Ne Zha 2 began, OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage was a brand-new product. Now it has been supporting a wide range of industries for five years, building intelligent data infrastructure to unleash the power of data.

Looking ahead, OceanStor Pacific storage solutions—like Coco Cartoon's animated epics—will make waves across the world and carve out a legendary path of their own.