Ne Zha 2 opens in US theaters on August 22.

Good things come to those who wait. Rooted heavily in Chinese folklore, the whizbang, action-packed Ne Zha 2 welcomes newcomers into a dense and often juvenile initial hour, which can be a chore to sit through. But then, practically on a dime, it switches gears for its final 80-something minutes, swapping its toilet humor for mythological spectacle on a brain-breakingly enormous scale. The nearly two-and-a-half hour runtime might be intimidating for a kids’ film, but this transformation is worth your patience: Stick it out and Ne Zha 2 will show you things you’ve probably never seen before, or even imagined possible.

The 2019 original Ne Zha is (there’s no polite way to say this) a fart comedy for babies with some supernatural battles on the side, and Ne Zha 2 starts out the same way. At first, its vivid 3D animation is geared towards endless gags about belly flab and bodily fluids, in scenes that last a painfully long time, and are bookended confusingly nondescript reaction shots. Ironically, this deceptively relaxed pace is in service of a million-mile-an-hour plot, centering on an often unpleasant-looking protagonist: Ne Zha, a Taoist deity re-imagined as a fiery, magical imp with a menacing grin and distracting bags under his eyes. The story picks up where the first movie left off, after the adolescent Ne Zha and his rival-turned-bestie – the graceful, cool-as-ice Ao Bing – sacrificed their physical bodies to save Ne Zha’s village in the Chentang Pass.

Now their screwball, pot-bellied master Taiyi Zhenren tries to re-forge new avatars for them using a magical lotus – one of several bits of Chinese myth explained faster than any outsider can comprehend. Things go awry, leading to the amusing comedic predicament of Ne Zha having to share his temporary form with Ao Bing’s wandering spirit. (This introduction also teases a spiffy character re-design for Ne Zha down the line).

Before long, the last movie’s scheming villain – the lanky, stuttering Shen Gongbao – attacks Chentang Pass once more, throwing us breathlessly back into a familiar plot. Only this time, Gongbao has an enslaved army of godlike dragon kings in tow, whose imaginative powers include magical claws that can pierce through space itself and create portals to eye-popping fiery locations and put countless innocents at risk of visually spectacular volcanic doom.

As a Herculean quest to restore Ao Bing’s physical form and fight back kicks off, pristine white castles in the clouds play host to both resplendent jade birds soaring through the air and eye-rolling slapstick gags. These tonal paradoxes gradually mount alongside a story that becomes purely expositional, given the English dialogue’s clunky and all-too-literal translations. It feels, at times, like reading a AI-translated Wiki on Investiture of the Gods – the 16th century novel on which Ne Zha 2 is loosely based – while also having to dodge invasive pop-ups joking about barf and pee. But, as Ne Zha’s journey continues – and as he and Ao Bing struggle to share one body – hidden complexity comes to light. The angelic immortals, who speak of maintaining the order of various castes and sects, send Ne Zha to fight demonic entities whose only crimes appear to be causing a nuisance (not unlike Ne Zha himself). In fact, these demons usually take the form of adorable, anthropomorphic animals, signaling to even the youngest viewers in the audience that something in this heavenly hierarchy is amiss.

And then, as though a switch were suddenly flipped, the second of Ne Zha’s trials becomes both physically and emotionally super-charged, and it feels as though an entirely different team of storytellers had taken the reins. The action – a mix of ‘70s-style wuxia and supernatural spell-casting – is colorful and electric, at times literally. The characters, once broad archetypes aimed at explaining the plot, begin to suffer unimaginable anguish as Ne Zha 2’s cutesy façade becomes genuinely nightmarish, evoking real-life massacres and even the horrors of first-century Pompeii. You know, typical kids’ movie stuff.

This head-spinning shift in tone is accompanied by fitting character transformations, as the once Dennis the Menace-like Ne Zha is forced to contend with a more complicated adult world and the onslaught of difficult emotions bursting from within, threatening to shatter his fragile avatar. The sequel goes very quickly from facile to furious, taking shape as a humongus revenge saga steeped in betrayal and conspiracy as its characters search for the nuances within aesthetic extremes. With climax after climax, its action scenes become awe-inspiring, as thousands (if not millions) of either human or reptilian soldiers – some are both, in the vein of Final Fantasy – do battle in the sky and at sea, creating breathtaking vistas of glowing light against psychedelic landscapes.

Although most setups extend to characters announcing special abilities as soon as they become relevant (one of the many influences from Japanese anime), the result is often mesmerizing, between elemental sky battles and the emergence of as many extra limbs as are necessary to fire glowing arrows from magical wooden bows. You might recognize the specter of Akira Toriyama’s landmark Anime Dragon Ball Z from time to time; this marks the completion of a cultural ouroboros, since Toriyama originally borrowed from Chinese epics like Journey to the West, which also featured Ne Zha.

Not since The Lord of the Rings has any movie truly captured the enormous, religious scope of epic fantasy on screen. (That Ne Zha 2 is already the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time, with a $2.2 billion box office take, will come as no surprise once you see it reach its gargantuan final form.) What’s more, these escalations reframe the comedy too, preventing scenes from grinding to a halt for the sake of crass caricature and ensuring that all gags are firmly grounded in action and character first.

All the while, the storytellers never lose sight of dramatic moments, especially those between a fearful Ne Zha (voiced by Crystal Lee in the English dub) and his warrior parents (Michelle Yeoh, Vincent Rodriguez III) as his coming-of-age saga becomes not only about facing the cruelty of the adult world, but recognizing the injustice of its status quo – which Ne Zha and the other heroes seek to incinerate at the root. In an especially pleasant surprise, after an hour’s worth of clunky dialogue, this theme of rebellion culminates in the most rousing line in any recent English-language dub: Lee’s applause-worthy delivery of “If I can’t be who I am, I’ll just have to change the world!” at a pivotal moment.