The
Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017): Written by Makoto
Ueda, directed by Masaaki Yuasa. Starring: Gen Hoshino, Kana Hanazawa,
Hiroshi Kamiya, Ryuji Akiyama, and Mugihito.
Running Time: 93
minutes. Based on a novel of the same
name by Tomihiko Morimi.
Rating:
3.5/4
If Yuasa's other
recent release, Lu Over The Wall, went a bit too wild for its own good, The
Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is the opposite end of the spectrum, where
Yuasa manages a perfect balance of his wild instincts and creates a sublime and
wholly satisfying experience. It is zany, packed to the gills, and an
absolute visual feast, but also manages to create space for rather profound
reflections on the nature of time, innocence and growing up, and the
connectedness of all things. All that, and it's also funny as hell.
Our protagonist, known to us only
as The Girl with Black Hair, is a blissfully innocent young woman on
the cusp of adulthood, and determined to celebrate with a night out on the
town, drinking, partying, dancing, and enjoying the company of a massive cast of
colorful, memorable characters. Throughout it all, she is pursued by a
shy young man (The Student), sure of his love for her, but utterly at a loss as
to how to get her attention other than to manufacture scenarios where they bump
into each other "by coincidence," or as he calls it, "Operation
Run Into Her Often."
We start at a wedding, where both of
them are in attendance, and then wander throughout the entire town. We
are treated to settings that include a series of bars, a drinking ship on the
river, a book fair, and a student festival, and meet a remarkable
variety of people, all in various stages of despair or cynicism of one form or
another; despairing groups of student bachelors, despairing old businessmen,
despairing perverted collectors of erotic woodprints, the cold and calculating
head of an NSA-esque Student Affairs spy network, a selfish and greedy hoarder
of rare used books, and, my personal favorite, a veritable army of actors and
directors calling themselves the "Guerilla Theater," determined to
put on their show all over campus even though Student Affairs keeps chasing
them down and arresting their cast and crew members.
This wild run-around that supposedly
takes up only a single night of this strange city, but this magical night of
wonder feels like it stretches out for years on end, a fact commented on by
several of the characters, many of whom pine for a "happy ending" to
everything. A dozen different plot points and characters arcs are all
tied together in one way or another, and the fact that this film doesn't fly
apart at the seams like Lu Over The Wall
did is something of a miracle.
This elastic nature of time is a
repeated theme of the film, with both its visuals and the bizarro rules of
physics that govern this world emphasizing the very objective nature of time
and its passing. In one scene, several characters compare watches; that
of the girl, the youngest in the group, moves at a snail's pace and her
somewhat older drinking buddy's has a more regular tempo, while those of the
elderly businessmen spin forward at breakneck speed. Time, so fickle and
so strange, always feels slower for those with more life and so quickly
dissipated for those with less.
The Student ends up not being the
focus of most of the movie, which is for the better, since the real star are
the antics surrounding The Girl. The concept of her
character does run the risk of being a bit of a blank slate, or a
rather bland Jesus-esque figure (much of the third act involves her administering
to the sick throughout town, their ailments practically healed by her touch),
or perhaps simply being too innocently naive for her own good. However, I
found this to be the right fit alongside the more pessimistic nature of the
world around her. She literally brightens places up when she appears, and
has an instinctive sense of when someone needs help. This may be a subtle
commentary on the film's part that people of all stripes, when they are down,
could use a brief return to the boundless optimism of youth to regain their
footing in a strange world.
The film's sense of humor and
anything-goes attitude makes the film a riot, especially an extended sequence
where the conflict between the Guerilla Theater and the Student Affairs
committee reaches its climax, one of the most consistently funny bits I've seen
in a movie this year. There is also a particular running gag that suggests
Yuasa has it in for Sophism, a sentiment for which I have nothing but the
deepest sympathy.
I was particularly tickled that the
movie even manages to find time for a subplot surrounding a hoarder ruining a
book fair (complete with the presence of a God of Used Books) that is,
effectively, a love letter to the printed word and to the power of books and
stories to carry memories and experience through time and connect all those who
hold a book over the course of its existence. It's almost as if this
movie was determined to target every one of my particular sweet spots to get to
love it.
Not that that was ever necessary,
because I would have loved this movie even without my Inner Reader being
pandered to. This is a remarkable, adventurous, out-there movie that
takes full advantages of the inherent advantages of animation and lets the mind
and imagination expand to previously unexplored places of magic and
wonder. This is one of the best films I've yet seen this year.
-Noah Franc
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