[The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl]
Did you enjoy the The Tatami Galaxy? Would you care for a film set in that same world, but even zanier and more frenetic? Then you'll probably enjoy The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. I certainly did. (I'll just refer to it as "The Night is Short" if you don't mind). It's probably worth noting up front that while this movie shares some characters from The Tataxmi Galaxy, it is in no way part of the same story as that show.
The Night is Short follows the story of a man and a women (each unnamed, in classic Tatami Galaxy fashion) who are involved in a series of ridiculous, occasionally romantic, adventures over the course of a single night in Kyoto. In a similar way to the Tatami Galaxy, The Night is Short takes what seems like a fairly standard idea and then layers in absurdity, literary references, trickster gods, musical numbers and, of course, the triumphant return of Johnny. It took me awhile to get into the rhythm of this movie because it doens't really adhere to the beats of traditional narrative stories, but once I was over that hump I started to really enjoy the story. While the 'plot' feels slight, there's a thematic richness to the text that touches on fate, love, isolation, anxiety and ultimately on the way in which humans are connected to each other.
What's really remarkable about the movie is how much of a piece it feels with Tatami Galaxy. It feels like this movie could have come out the year after Tatami Galaxy was released. To some extent that shouldn't be surprising because the film is based on a novel by the same writer as the Tatami Galaxy, it features characters from The Tatami Galaxy, it has the same director, script writer, same musical band and character designer. But it's more than that. The movie retains many of the stylistic elements of the series such as the rapid-fire line delivery, the same colour design, the use of internal monologue and all of Yuasa's trademark, highly subjective visual metaphor where the world itself reflects the emotional turmoil of the characters. Considering how difficult it is in to keep teams of people together in the anime industry it's remarkable that they managed to so effortless recapture the same style as the The Tatami Galaxy.
Where the movie parts most dramatically from the direction of Tatami Galaxy is in the movie's pacing and kineticism. There is almost no downtime throughout the entirety of The Night is Short, for better or worse. It is full blown Yuasa wackiness right from the first minute and it only gets wilder and more unhinged as it develops. I went back to re-watch The Tatami Galaxy and the direction in that series is sedate and reflective by comparison. Yuasa's cinematography is so unchained in this movie that I forgot that he'd just made a relatively restrained series such as Ping Pong. The energy level that this movie builds to and maintains is more reminiscent of Mind Game. I don't think this will be to everyone's taste, especially those who are fans of Yuasa's more sedate works. I liked it, but I still thought the movie could have done with some time to breathe and it took me a little while to get on board with the visuals that Yuasa was hurling at me.
While I enjoyed the movie I still feel it could have used a bit more polish. The movie needed some breathing room to allow you to acclimatize to the characters and the world. Certain scenes showed the tell tale signs of being shot in a manner to make them cheap, whereas I would have preferred to see them animated in full. The presence of 'flash style' animation in places may distract some, I didn't have an issue with it because most of the movie looked great and featured tons of interesting movement. Even with these minor quibbles, I am really grateful that Yuasa (somehow?) gets to make movies like these, which appears to have zero commercial value, in the year 2017.