Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

Note: I got to see this at a special premiere screening in my city, with Masaaki Yuasa himself in attendance! He's a very lovely guy. I hope that hasn't biased my review too much. This film is closely intertwined with The Tatami Galaxy, a previous Yuasa-directed work. Their original novels were written by the same author, they share a setting in Kyoto and apparently take place in the same universe - many characters from TG pop up here and there in NiS, if not always in the way you expect them to. It's not strictly a sequel, but you'll get much more out of the filmif you've seen Tatami, so that's something to consider. Night is Short, much like Tatami Galaxy, is a bit of a difficult sell plot-wise - it focuses mostly on a college student only named Senpai whose only goal is to win the heart of his crush, the titular Girl, over the course of a night in which the two are out and about in Kyoto. Of course, it's not quite that simple- inventive camerawork and use of surrealism turn what could have been a very dull story into an amazingly fun adventure through Kyoto with a bouncy, dynamic cast of lovable characters. Without revealing too much, the film retains Tatami Galaxy's distinctive, surreal visual style and sense of humour, but is much more lighthearted, comedic, and amazingly over-the-top in places without missing out on conveying its own messages. If you liked Tatami Galaxy, I can practically guarantee you'll love Night is Short. The increased film budget combined with Yuasa's direction style lead to some beautiful animation sequences, and the Girl is so amazingly cheery, she can't help but grab your interest. An easy 10/10 from me, but then again I also loved Tatami.

This movie is a beautiful mess. Going into "The Night is Short...", a movie that has the same staff as The Tatami Galaxy, the same distinctive artstyle as The Tatami Galaxy, starring a pair of nameless protagonists (Senpai and The Black-Haired Maiden) as per The Tatami Galaxy, is adapted from a novel by Tomohiko Morimi (of The Tatami Galaxy), shares the same fictional universe as The Tatami Galaxy (featuring several of its characters), and features a theme song by Asian Kung-Fu Generation for good measure, you'd be forgiven for expecting this movie to be The Tatami Galaxy 2.0 (and if you haven't seen The Tatami Galaxy...what the hell are you doing here? Go watch The Tatami Galaxy). For all it shares with its predecessor, though, The Night is Short is unmistakeably its own movie, taking the fast-paced energy and absurd visuals of Tatami and dialling them both up to 11. The Night is Short is a manic sugar rush of a movie. It eschews any traditional story structure (or rather, won't sit still long enough to have one) in favour of introducing a colourful cast of drunken, exaggerated, morally-degenerate losers, introducing a couple hundred different plot points, and then throwing them all in a blender. The characters each have their own plots, intersecting at random, resulting in a chaotic storm of subplots. The premise, despite this, is quite simple. It revolves around a single night of binge-drinking during a Kyoto University festival. Fittingly, the movie is a dizzying, disorienting, drunken mess of an experience, with surrealist animation and a constantly shifting plot complete with mile-a-minute dialogue and narration further befuddling things. The animation is completely gorgeous, as is standard for Yuasa Masaaki, with a unique and psychedelic colour palette, goofy and free-form animation that in many ways recalls the rubber hose animation style of the 1930s, and a beautiful representation of its setting, strikingly adorned with maple trees, lanterns, and darumaka dolls. This is a movie that never sits still, demanding that you don't look away for even a second. In a way, the setting is the greatest tool this movie has at its disposal. The colourful nightlife of Kyoto is shown in vivid detail, and the intersecting plot points and cast members acting independently makes the city feel like a living, breathing thing, assisted by an eclectic soundtrack full of symphonic music, tango, rock, and baroque pop. The presentation is something that's uniquely Masaaki, with interesting camera shots, pans, and angles all over the place. There's a lot of symbolism, surrealism, and absurdism to be found here. The environment shifts to exaggerate the thoughts and feelings of the characters, there are sequences shown entirely in the minds of our characters, and the night the movie revolves around follows a series of events purposely far beyond what could ever happen in a single night. The narrative is less direct and more of a stream-of-consciousness blur. It can't be overstated just how unique a piece of work The Night is Short is, even in spite of what it shares with previous Yuasa Masaaki works. It's a movie that seemed desperate to cram every random thought it could into its runtime, common sense be damned. To demonstrate, here are a few things that happen in this movie, entirely out of context. An impromptu series of musical numbers in the second act. A tornado of fish. A black market for rare literature that competes for books by eating spicy food. A cold that infects the entire population of Kyoto within the space of a few hours. A loanshark who trades exclusively in pornographic woodblocks. Sure, you could consider these spoilers, but it's hard to spoil a movie that has absolutely no commitment to telling a coherent narrative. To say the least, The Night is Short is not a movie for everyone. There are people who will be turned off by its eccentric art style, its unique writing style, its hectic pace, its unrelenting dialogue, its refusal to adhere to a structured story, it surrealism, its absurdism, or all of the above. Additionally, with the sole exception of The Black-Haired Maiden, the cast aren't traditionally likeable people, and are all drunken losers, which can also put people off (though the point, of course, isn't to empathize with them - in any other series every member of the cast would be the sole comic relief character). But for those who can get past all that and are willing to let any ideas they have about what anime is supposed to be, The Night is Short is a brilliant, abstract, chaotic mess of frantic, frenetic joy and wonder. It's a mere hour and a half that packs in more content than a full-length series. It's a manic, incomprehensible mess of a movie, and a worthy debut for studio Science Saru. Story/Plot: 6/10 Animation/Graphics: 10/10 Music/Background: 10/10 Characters: 7/10 Overall: 8/10 For Fans Of: Mind Game, The Tatami Galaxy

After I finished watching this movie I felt like I missed something. It was by no means bad but the response to it all around seemed overwhelmingly positive. I didn’t want to be unfair to the movie before reviewing it so I whipped out a notepad++ to make thorough notes for it during a re-watch to make sure I didn’t miss anything. The result of that was pretty predictable, I still don’t think this movie is fantastic but I appreciate what it did right and can definitely see why people would adore it. At its most basic, Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome (from now on Mijikashicause I don’t hate myself) is a bare bones story crafted for the purpose of conveying a few simple but wholesome and motivational messages. Love can’t be explained rationally, instead of trying to understand and explain it - take a leap into darkness. You won’t know until you try so don’t hesitate. Second after that is that everything in the world is connected, sometimes in a way that isn’t immediately obvious so don’t lock yourself away from others and follow the thread of fate. It’s nothing revelatory but what takes it a step above other movies is the excellent presentation. During my re-watch I gained appreciation for just how tightly made this movie is, it’s not without flaws and I’ll bring them up later but there’s no denying that a lot of effort went into crafting it. Yuasa is known for his mastery of visuals and Mijikashi is not exception. The overall art style takes after Tatami Galaxy with little to shading and a lot of very vibrant and contrasting imagery. However it has a flavor of its own that comes through in textures, effects and visuals metaphors. My personal favourite moment in the film is the used book sale segment. It’s happening at night so the only illuminated parts are the various stall. Outside world is cut off from the view with trees overlaid with lace patterns. It creates such a personal atmosphere for the whole segment, like it’s a special place disconnected from everywhere else. This kind of quality is consistent throughout and Mijikashi keeps varying up visuals and locations to keep things fresh throughout. It’s not a movie you’d watch for animation alone but it’s a strong aspect of it nonetheless. The second aspect that springs to mind when talking about very meticulously crafted nature of the movie it’s how much effort went into making everything tie together. Most of what you see throughout the movie is bound to reappear later on, most characters and subplots weave in and out of each other all the time. It’s a great way to show how everything connected without hitting the viewer over the head with it (though Mijikashi still later hits you over the head with it). To say a bit about the characters I think it’s important to note that they’re not meant to be deep or particularly fleshed out. Another deliberate aspect of this movie is that most of them don’t even have actual names. Our two main characters don’t even go by names, they represent ideas. Raven Haired Maiden being an embodiment of optimism and wonder and eagerness to try new things who acts as a counterpart to Senpai who’s held back by constant doubts, hesitation and cynicism. However not everything is that good. I feel like the goal of the movie is confusing by the end of it. While it certainly does get the message across, it throws so much shit at you at any point that it’s easy to get lost and think that there’s supposed to be something more to it. Maybe it’s my personal hangup but I feel like at times Yuasa invites the viewer to further interpret the scenes but it ends up not being all that important in the long run. Everything that you might get from this movie thematically will be told to you directly at one point or another so it feels like everything else is just an unnecessary distraction. Did the Daruma heads in the bar scene have any significance? Is there a reason why Don Underpants’s play was so heavily focused on them beyond superficial connection between darumas and wishes? Are the Koi fish throughout the movie meant to say something more or is it there just for a pun? Why is Rihaku making his goons steal pants? Was there any significance to alcohol’s overwhelming presence? I feel like most of these would be easier to understand if I could read the 300 pages long book this 90 minutes long movie is based on. Music is perhaps the most unremarkable aspect of this movie. It’s well made and fits every scene to a t but with how eccentric the movie otherwise it a generic soundtrack doesn’t do it justice. The only musical segments that actually stood out to me were the musicals, it’s a rare thing to see in anime and they don’t sound much like anything else in the movie while also serving as a vehicle for interesting animation and show off the versatile talent of voice actors involved. In conclusion, Mijikashi is a good movie, not flawless but it’s a well paced ride many people will be able to relate to and enjoy. Just don’t expect it to be as complex as Tatami Galaxy or Mind Game and don’t fret over missing some details, anything you can get from this movie will be rammed into your head.

A lot can happen in a night, a night where time moves so fast. For someone, it might just be a night of humiliation. For someone else, it could be a night that ended gloriously with your dreams come true. For many, it can be a night of adventure. Reality works in some contorted ways. This is further exemplified by the fantastic, reality-bending visuals employed by director Masaaki Yuasa and his team over at Science Saru. The visuals are chaotic, imaginative, and bursting with life everywhere. Everything moves wonderfully and the wonderful designs lend themselves over to both this and the ability to simply expandas they please. Flowers, hallucinations, flames spewing from blazing hot meals, everything is a sheer spectacle that is incredibly difficult to do justice towards. Of equal spectacle is the narrative. Everything builds off of one another, from small comments in one’s past to events currently happening, and characters you might have not expected to be so reoccurring once their story seemed to have concluded. No matter how absurd, like a tornado blowing fish or a literal literature god who takes book tags and appears out of a book like a pop-up, everything from the first 3 acts pile into one another as one seemingly disconnected story arc weaves brilliantly into another and into the final act once the night has passed. Whereas many bad narratives have the complaint levied on them about how reality seems to bend to the whims of the narrative for no reason, here, that is a physical aspect of the film that brings everything into relevance in completely unexpected and equally glorious ways. It's an incredibly tight circuit of knots of love, alcohol, plays, betrayal, sickness, literature, and world views. The characters are all as lively as the visuals and bring the chaotic story to life with pinpoint precision. From the raven-haired main girl just strolling and taking challenges throughout the night with friends, to the coincidence-manipulating young, hopelessly romantic lad who takes each opportunity to seize his opportunity with beach task ahead, only for it to not pay off as intended until much later than he expected, we see all sorts of colorful characters tie into each other as time moves differently for everyone, sicknesses and a play are passed down to everyone, and we see both the joy of taking risks in the name of fun and love, and the idea of how everyone is connected in some way in any community. It is glorious to absorb, even if it moved at a daunting pace that matches how short the night is and how much time can really fly. The music, composed by Michiru Oshima, is wild, carrying a sort of gung-ho attitude to it. It's a fairly good soundtrack, with some equally well-done musical songs for the play that takes center stage in the third act of the four act film. The only decisively weak part would be the ending credits theme, "Kouya wo Aruke (荒野を歩け)" by ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, which, while not bad, is a forgettable track with vocals that feel weak; it is arguably one of his weakest tracks. Ultimately, this film is a bombastic joy that exemplifies the wonders in life, in one night and a day of aftermath. This film encourages you to not always dwell on how everything can go wrong and sometimes just take the leap of faith, and it encourages you to look back on not just your life, but on the small, fun adventures you take in a day or an evening. On that same vein, you should jump into this film head first and reminisce on its brilliance, messages, delivery of those messages, and its wonderful method to madness. And once you’re done, be sure to join me as we dance the dance of the sophists.