To Be Hero X: The Donghua That Literally Flattens Reality
There is a scene in episode 2 of To Be Hero X that I have rewatched seventeen times. Not because it is the most emotional scene in the show — though it is close. Not because it has the best animation — though it is a technical flex of the highest order. I rewatch it because there is a single frame, lasting perhaps eight, where the protagonist throws a punch and the entire world folds along the line of his fist like origami. A three-dimensional city block collapses sideways into a flat plane. The camera, which was tracking through 3D space moments earlier, is suddenly locked to a 2D parallax scrolling rig. And the character — still moving, still fighting — is now drawn in a style that would not look out of place in a 1990s Gainax production. It is the most audacious piece of animation direction I have seen in any television series, from any country, in at least five years. And it is not the most ambitious thing Li Haoling attempts in this show.
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching a director spend a decade building toward something and knowing, with absolute certainty, that almost no one in the English-speaking world is paying attention. Li Haoling has been making Chinese animation since before "donghua" was a word most Western anime fans recognized. His first series, To Be Hero (2016), was a twelve-minute-per-episode gag comedy about a slob who becomes a superhero by accidentally absorbing an alien. It was scrappy, juvenile, and visibly underfunded — the kind of show you make when you have ideas but no budget, talent but no institutional support. But it had something that almost no other Chinese animation of its era had: a visual identity. The character designs were ugly on purpose, drawn with thick, deliberately crude lines that suggested the animators were being given genuine creative freedom rather than being handed a rigid production bible and told to color inside the lines.
To Be Heroine (2018) took the same visual DNA and applied it to a genre shift so severe it felt like whiplash. The gag comedy framework was still present, but underneath it was a genuinely ambitious narrative about identity, memory, and the commodification of human experience in a digital world. The protagonist — a teenage girl who discovers that her memories are being extracted and sold as entertainment — was a far more complex character than the male lead of the first series. The animation was still rough. The budget clearly did not match the ambition. But the ambition itself was unmistakable. Li Haoling was not interested in making competent, forgettable content that filled a programming slot. He was interested in using animation to say things that live-action could not say. The medium was not a delivery mechanism for the story. The medium was the story. The way characters were drawn, the way color shifted between emotional registers, the way the animation style itself degraded when characters were losing their grip on reality — these were not stylistic choices layered on top of the narrative. They were the narrative.
Which brings us to To Be Hero X. The bilibili/Aniplex co-production that makes this show possible represents something genuinely unprecedented in Chinese animation: a director who has been pushing against the limits of his medium for ten years, finally handed the resources to push through those limits. Aniplex's involvement is particularly significant — not just as a funding source, but as a creative partner. This is not a case of a Japanese studio providing money and distribution while the Chinese studio does all the creative work. Aniplex's experience with the Fate franchise — specifically the Heaven's Feel film trilogy's groundbreaking integration of 2D and 3D elements — directly informs the technical pipeline here. The difference is philosophical. Heaven's Feel works incredibly hard to hide the boundary between 2D and 3D, to make the transition so seamless that the audience never consciously notices it. To Be Hero X does the opposite. It puts the seam front and center and makes it the point. It wants you to see the boundary. It wants you to feel the transition happening. Because the transition — the moment when three-dimensional reality collapses into two-dimensional representation — is what the entire show is about.
The Power That Should Not Work
In the world of To Be Hero X, heroes are ranked, branded, traded, and evaluated by a system that reduces three-dimensional human beings — with fears, contradictions, private acts of courage, and morally complicated histories — into two-dimensional scores. A letter grade. A number on a chart. A market value. This is the logical endpoint of algorithmic culture, of the attention economy, of a world that has decided that everything can be measured and everything that can be measured can be ranked. The protagonist enters this system with a power that, on paper, is laughably weak: the ability to flatten reality from three dimensions into two. C-rank at best, says the evaluation board. Barely worth the cost of training.
What the evaluation board misses — what all such systems inevitably miss — is that the protagonist's power is not a combat ability in the conventional sense. It is a philosophical argument made manifest. The power to flatten reality is the same power that the ranking system already exerts on every hero it evaluates. The difference is that the protagonist can flatten back. He can take the two-dimensional space that the system imposes on people — the reduction of a life to a score, of a person to a ranking — and make it a weapon. He can fight inside the flattening. He can turn the mechanism of dehumanization against the institution that created it.
This is not subtext. The show is explicit about it. In episode 5 — a self-contained story about a retired hero now working at a convenience store, his license expired, his ranking zeroed out, his legacy reduced to a footnote in the ranking database — the retired hero explains to the protagonist why he stopped fighting. "They told me my value was my score," he says. "I believed them. By the time I realized the score was measuring the wrong thing, I had already stopped being the right thing." This is a line of dialogue in an animated show about people who punch each other through buildings. And it lands. Not because it is profound in isolation, but because the show has spent four episodes building the visual and narrative framework that gives it weight.
The Production Pipeline That Should Not Exist
The technical achievement here is difficult to overstate without getting into production jargon that will bore anyone who is not an animator. So I will be brief. Most animated productions choose a pipeline — either 2D hand-drawn animation or 3D CGI — and stick with it for the entire production. Some high-budget productions, like Attack on Titan or Demon Slayer, blend 2D characters with 3D backgrounds in ways that are seamless enough to be invisible to most viewers. To Be Hero X does something categorically different and substantially harder. It switches pipelines mid-scene. Not between episodes. Not between cuts. Mid-scene, mid-shot, sometimes mid-punch.
A single sequence can begin in full 3D CGI — environments rendered with Blender-based pipelines similar to those used for Genshin Impact cutscenes, characters rigged with skeletal animation, dynamic lighting models that respond to in-scene light sources. Then, without a cut, without a transition, the animation shifts into hand-keyed 2D. The lighting model changes. The character rigs switch from skeletal to frame-by-frame drawings. The camera, which moments ago was moving freely through three-dimensional space with full parallax and depth of field, is suddenly locked to a two-dimensional plane — and the show keeps going. The fight continues. The emotional beat lands. The audience, if the production has done its job correctly, does not think about the pipeline switch at all. They just feel that something has changed, that the world has shifted, that the stakes have become more personal.
This requires both a 3D animation team and a traditional 2D team working on the exact same sequence, handing off control frame by frame. Most studios would never attempt this. The scheduling complexity is a logistical nightmare. The creative coordination required — making sure that the character's expression in the 3D frame matches the character's expression in the 2D frame that follows, that the color grading is consistent, that the visual language of the transition communicates something meaningful rather than just looking cool — is the kind of challenge that normally gets solved by not attempting it. Li Haoling built a studio specifically to attempt it.
The Flaw That Makes It Interesting
I need to be honest: the middle arc, episodes 6 through 9, loses narrative momentum. The villain's motivation, while thematically coherent and well-integrated with the show's critique of ranking systems, is exposited rather than dramatized. There is a four-episode stretch where the script explains at length what the show has already demonstrated visually, and the pacing suffers for it. This is a common structural problem with ambitious first seasons — Arcane had a similar issue in its first three episodes, where the show had to establish so much worldbuilding that the emotional through-line momentarily stalled. To Be Hero X does not stall quite as severely, but the middle episodes lack the propulsive energy of the opening and closing arcs.
What saves the show from this sag — and it does save it — is that when it is firing on all cylinders, it is operating at a level no other 2025-2026 donghua approaches. The opening two episodes. The standalone episode 5. The finale, which pays off character threads seeded in episode 1 with a structural confidence that suggests the entire season was boarded as a single unit rather than assembled episode-by-episode. These peaks are high enough that the valleys become tolerable — not invisible, but tolerable. They are not just good animation. They are good art. And art this ambitious is allowed to be imperfect. Ambition without flaw is not ambition. It is marketing.
Why This Matters Beyond This Show
To Be Hero X is important beyond its quality as entertainment. It represents a proof of concept for a specific model of international animation co-production. If a Chinese director with a decade of experience and a genuine artistic vision can be paired with a Japanese studio that provides resources and creative partnership rather than just funding and distribution, the result can compete with — and in some dimensions, exceed — anything either country produces independently.
The implications extend beyond China and Japan. The animation industry is increasingly globalized, with production pipelines distributed across multiple countries. Most of these arrangements are transactional: one country provides cheap labor, another provides creative direction, another handles distribution. To Be Hero X suggests a different model — one where the creative partnership is genuine, where the visual identity of the production emerges from the collaboration rather than being imposed by the party with the most money, and where the result is recognizable as the product of a specific artistic vision rather than a committee.
This model is replicable. It requires three things: a director with a clear vision, a studio partner willing to trust that vision, and an audience willing to meet ambitious animation on its own terms. The first two conditions exist, in China and Japan and increasingly in Korea, France, and other countries with strong animation traditions. The third condition — the audience — is what this article is trying to build.
Watch the first two episodes. If the folding-world sequences do not grab you, the show is not for you — not every show is for every person, and that is fine. If they do grab you — and I suspect, based on the seventeen viewings I mentioned at the start, that they will — you are about to discover what happens when a decade of frustrated artistic ambition finally gets a budget and a partner that believes in the vision. It does not happen often. When it does, it is worth paying attention.
Details & Where to Watch
- Rating: ★ 8.9 Composite | MAL: 8.6
- Director: Li Haoling (To Be Hero, To Be Heroine, Link Click)
- Studio: bilibili × Aniplex co-production
- Episodes: 12 (Season 1, 2025)
- Streaming: Crunchyroll — English subtitles
- Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Experimental Animation
For fans of: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Mob Psycho 100, FLCL, The Tatami Galaxy, Arcane, Re:Cyborg