凸变英雄X · 2025 · Hybrid 2D/3D · Action
I have a confession: when I first heard the premise — "a hero whose power is flattening reality into 2D" — I laughed. It sounded like a gimmick a producer pitched in an elevator, the kind of high-concept hook that sounds brilliant in a thirty-second meeting and collapses the moment you try to build a show around it. Then I watched episode two. A single frame where the protagonist throws a punch and the entire city block folds along the line of his fist like origami. That frame changed my mind about everything. This is not a gimmick that happens to be a show. This is a show that weaponizes what everyone else would have treated as a gimmick and makes it the thesis statement for an argument about what it means to be seen, ranked, and reduced by systems of power.
Director Li Haoling has spent his career building toward this moment, and understanding the arc of that career is essential to understanding why To Be Hero X matters beyond its visual fireworks. If you know Chinese animation, you know his name from To Be Hero (2016) and To Be Heroine (2018) — the first two entries in what has become a thematic trilogy about what it means to be a hero in a world that has stopped believing in them.
Those early works were scrappy, experimental, and rough around the edges. 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 visibly underfunded, and it wore its poverty on its sleeve — crude linework, limited animation cycles, backgrounds that sometimes looked like they had been drawn on notebook paper. But it had something that almost no other Chinese animation of its era possessed: a visual identity. The character designs were ugly on purpose. The animation was loose on purpose. Li Haoling was giving his team genuine creative freedom rather than handing them a rigid production bible and telling them to color inside the lines.
To Be Heroine (2018) took the same visual DNA and pushed it somewhere far more ambitious. 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 style itself degraded when she was losing her grip on reality. Colors desaturated. Linework became uncertain, almost trembling. The medium was not a delivery mechanism for the story. The medium was the story. This is the context that makes the bilibili/Aniplex co-production of To Be Hero X so significant. It is what happens when a director who spent a decade pushing against the limits of his medium is finally handed the resources to push through those limits. Aniplex's experience with the Fate franchise — particularly the Heaven's Feel film trilogy's integration of 2D and 3D — directly informs the technical approach here. But where Heaven's Feel hides the seam between 2D and 3D, To Be Hero X puts it front and center and makes it the point.
🟢 Mild Spoilers — premise only, no key plot twists
The setup is deceptively simple. In a near-future world, heroes are ranked, branded, and commodified — think My Hero Academia's popularity-poll system taken to its logical capitalist conclusion, or One Punch Man's Hero Association minus the satire and plus genuine systemic critique. The protagonist enters this system not as a powerful contender but as someone whose power looks embarrassingly weak on paper: the ability to flatten reality into two dimensions. A C-rank ability at best, according to the ranking board. Barely worth the cost of training, says the evaluation committee.
But here is where a lesser show would have played this as a straightforward underdog story — the weak power that is secretly strong, the C-rank nobody who turns out to be S-tier. To Be Hero X does something more interesting. The protagonist's power is not secretly overpowered. It does not let him punch through buildings or defeat enemies in one hit. What it does — what no ranking board knows how to measure — is expose the lie at the heart of the ranking system itself. If the system reduces three-dimensional human beings to two-dimensional scores, the protagonist's power is the ability to flatten back. To take the two-dimensional space imposed by the system and make it a weapon. To fight inside the flattening. This is not "weak power is secretly strong." This is "the power is a philosophical argument made manifest."
The 3D-to-2D transition mechanism is where the show earns every bit of its technical reputation. When the protagonist triggers his ability, the animation pipeline literally shifts mid-scene. The 3D CGI environments — rendered with the same Blender-based pipeline that powers modern Genshin Impact cutscenes — are not simply filtered through a 2D post-processing pass. They are re-authored as 2D animation. The lighting model changes mid-frame. Character rigs switch from skeletal animation to hand-keyed drawings. The camera, which moments ago was moving freely through 3D space, locks to a 2D plane with parallax scrolling.
From a production standpoint, this is absolute madness. A single fight scene can require 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 pipeline complexity alone is a scheduling nightmare, the kind of thing that produces legendary production delays. Li Haoling built a studio specifically to handle this workflow. He hired animators who could work in both 3D and 2D. He designed a pipeline where the handoff between teams was not a bottleneck but a creative dialogue.
Many viewers will compare this to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the comparison is fair but imprecise. Spider-Verse used mixed media to express the collision of different realities — each character from a different universe is animated in a different style. To Be Hero X uses mixed media to express the collision of different powers. The animation style does not represent which universe a character comes from. It represents whose power is currently active. When the protagonist flattens reality, he is not just changing what the audience sees. He is changing the rules of the fight. The animation language is the gameplay language.
The protagonist's hero form is drawn in a style that would not look out of place in a 1990s Gainax production: thick gestural lines, exaggerated facial expressions holding for exactly one frame too long, action poses prioritizing silhouette readability over anatomical correctness. This is not nostalgia bait. Li Haoling is making a formal argument: 2D is not obsolete, not a stepping stone to "more realistic" 3D. 2D is a complete artistic language with its own grammar, and To Be Hero X is a demonstration of what that grammar can do when pushed to its limit.
The character writing, however, is what separates this from mere technical spectacle. The protagonist is afraid — genuinely, visibly afraid — in ways that most action protagonists are not allowed to be. There is a scene in episode five, a standalone episode that functions as a self-contained short film about a retired hero running a convenience store, where the fear of being ranked, of being reduced to a number, is shown to be more crippling than any physical wound. It is the best single episode of donghua I have watched in 2026, and it contains zero fight scenes. That is the kind of confidence this show has.
The visual language carries meaning beyond spectacle. The transition from 3D to 2D maps directly onto the show's thematic core: the flattening of human beings into data points by systems of power. When the ranking board evaluates a hero, it reduces a three-dimensional person — with fears, contradictions, private acts of courage — into a two-dimensional score. The protagonist's power is literally the ability to do to reality what the system does to people. The question the show keeps asking: can you weaponize the flattening? Can you make two-dimensional space a place of resistance rather than erasure?
Here is the thing I need to say even though I love this show: the middle arc — episodes 6 through 9 — loses emotional momentum. The villain's motivation, while thematically coherent, is exposited rather than dramatized. There is a four-episode stretch where the show explains at length what it has already demonstrated visually. Characters stand in rooms and deliver monologues about the ranking system's injustice. The show seems to forget, temporarily, that its primary mode of communication is visual. It starts talking when it should be showing.
This is a first-season structural problem that many ambitious shows encounter. Arcane season 1 struggled with similar middle-act pacing in its first three episodes before locking in with terrifying confidence. To Be Hero X does not quite lock in with the same confidence. The middle stretch feels like a show that is so worried you might not have understood its themes that it decides to spell them out, and in doing so, temporarily forgets that its themes are already visible in every frame. It is a frustrating stretch precisely because the rest of the show is so good.
But when it is firing on all cylinders — the opening two episodes, the finale, and that remarkable standalone episode 5 — it is operating at a level that no other 2025-2026 donghua approaches. The gap between To Be Hero X at its best and everything else at its best is not small. It is the gap between a show that is trying to be good and a show that is trying to be important.
If Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved that audiences would embrace radical visual experimentation in service of character, To Be Hero X makes the parallel argument for long-form television. It argues, across twelve episodes, that a weekly 24-minute episode can have as much aesthetic ambition as a $150-million feature film. That argument matters — for donghua as an industry, and for animation as a medium.
The comparison to Mob Psycho 100 is also apt — both shows use extreme stylistic shifts to externalize internal emotional states, and both understand that "simple" art styles are not simple to execute. But To Be Hero X pushes further into abstraction than Mob ever did, and it does so in service of a more specific political argument about systems of evaluation and the flattening of human worth.
If I had to pick one moment that captures why this show matters, it would not be any of the spectacular fights. It would be a quiet moment in episode five — the retired hero episode — where the protagonist, not in hero form, just a person, looks at a ranking board and sees his own name. Not at the top. Not at the bottom. Just there. A number among numbers. And the animation, for exactly three seconds, goes completely flat. No depth. No shading. Just a line drawing of a person staring at a line drawing of himself. It is the most devastating three seconds of animation I have seen this year, and it contains zero action. That is this show's real power: not the flattening of buildings, but the flattening of people — and the quiet, impossible question of whether you can flatten back.
Bottom line: To Be Hero X is the most formally ambitious donghua ever made, and it is not close. The middle arc is a pacing problem, not a creative failure. If season 2 solves that structural issue — and every indication from the production team suggests they know exactly what needs fixing — this franchise could become the first donghua to genuinely compete with top-tier anime on both commercial and critical terms. Watch it for the visual invention. Stay for the argument it is making about what it means to be seen.
For anime fans who like: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Mob Psycho 100, Re:Cyborg, FLCL, The Tatami Galaxy