The Night is Short, Walk on Girl: Quick Thoughts

I’m so glad to have a good movie theater next to me now. Especially a nice, big one that launches anime titles in it. It’s not like I didn’t have one when I was in the Pacific Northwest, but Wichita had a movie theater that is a lot closer to me in distance and has a more straight forward route getting there. Meaning, I didn’t have to travel on a freeway or highway system. Systems I don’t like driving on, even if I am used to it. That being said, the movie theater experience was average for a film that didn’t get much attention to it for some reason. I don’t know if the Night is Short, Walk on Girl was that high end of a product from Yuasa even after Devilman Crybaby debuted, but did people showed up. There were lots of open seats and everything, but there were people there. That’s what matters, right? I miss my comfy, leather, and reclinable seats from my past local theater, but I am not living at the theater. The seats were more than comfy for an hour and a half movie.

If I had to describe The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, it would be like Tokyo Godfather that didn’t happen around Christmas time with a very heavy douse of Paprika attached to it. Yup, the best kind of culmination of too Satoshi Kon films, but it’s Masaki Yuasa. The movie itself is how I imagine Irina’s college nights were like. A college girl spends her night walking around, drinking, never getting drunk, gather friends through her drinking, and having weird happenstances happen that she just rolls with. The other half of the story is a male by the name of Senpai in this film, trying to ask this perfect girl out on a date, but keeps following into very adult traps like getting his underwear stolen, being called a pervert for a lot of reasons, ending up in worse and worse schemes to ask this girl out, and failing at not getting drunk. He does eventually ask her out though, but that is beside the point. It’s a very strange, yet wonderful movie that has its side characters be introduced in the first part of a movie and play out side roles through out the movie that develop their personalities further. It’s just a strange night of drinking and whatever happens afterward put into anime form. What’s not to love about that?

As stated before, this is a Masaki Yuasa film. The art and direction is full of his strange directional style and cartoonish in nature art and animation. If you just look at the character designs, you can tell that Yuasa is behind this film. This is good, because having his presence in the film is what makes it feel unique. Watching people get drunk and have weird visual styles emphasize what they see and what happens to them is a classic animation thing. Think of the pink elephant scene of Dumbo, but wilder. I’ve wanted to see that in a more adult context for a while. Finally seeing this on screen is the stuff of wonders for me. This is an adult film, so I wouldn’t recommend showing this movie to kids. That being said, this movie is quite a trip and a lot of fun. I know that as of now, you can’t watch this movie theaters in a while, but watch out for the inevitable release on dvd and blu-ray and appearance on Netflix by G-Kids. I mean, G-Kids has been putting their movies on Netflix in time anyway. Give it a watch when you have the chance.