Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
2017 · Masaaki Yuasa
As a group of university students go out for a night on the town, a sophomore known only as "The Girl with Black Hair" experiences a series of surreal encounters with the local nightlife – all the while unaware of the romantic longings of "Senpai", a senior student who has been creating increasingly fantastic and contrived reasons to run into her in an effort to win her heart.
dir. Masaaki Yuasa · 2017
One ecstatic Kyoto night, stretched and compressed like taffy: a guileless junior barhops through drinking contests, used-book fairs, and guerrilla theatre, while a lovestruck senior engineers ever more absurd 'coincidental' meetings. Masaaki Yuasa — Japanese animation's great shape-shifter, heir to the medium's experimental fringe — adapts Tomihiko Morimi's novel as a companion piece to his cult series The Tatami Galaxy, in the same flattened, poster-bright style: rubber-limbed figures, colors that lurch with drunkenness, character designs by Yusuke Nakamura that look like indie record sleeves come alive. Made at Yuasa's own studio Science SARU, it's a demonstration of what hand-drawn-plus-Flash hybrid animation can do that photorealism can't — subjective time is the actual subject, the night dilating for the young and racing for the old. It's also, slyly, a musical, a folklore anthology, and an argument that all humans are connected through the secondhand books they've touched. The film beat Your Name-scale competition to take the Japan Academy Prize for animation — a rare mainstream laurel for a genuine eccentric.
Lines of influence
- Mind Game (2004) — Yuasa's debut feature codified his rubber-limbed, medium-hopping collage — figures stretch, flatten and swap into photo-collage and hand-drawn scribble mid-motion — the exact plasticity Night Is Short deploys on its Kyoto revelers.
- The Tatami Galaxy (2010) — Same Tomihiko Morimi Kyoto-student universe and Yusuke Nakamura character designs, and it established the recursive subjective-time structure (a night looping/dilating) that Night Is Short compresses into a single elastic evening.
- Kemonozume (2006) — Yuasa's first TV series pushed the loose brush-line contour and boneless limb animation — deliberately 'wrong,' fluid drawing over model-sheet precision — that becomes Night Is Short's house style.
- Belladonna of Sadness (1973) — The foundational Japanese experimental-anime feature: flat Art Nouveau illustration panned across still watercolor panels and structured as an erotic folklore musical, prefiguring the poster-flat graphic tableaux and song-driven episodes here.
- Yellow Submarine (1968) — Pop-art flat color-field graphics and Heinz Edelmann's poster-illustration design — animation as moving screenprint — is the graphic-design lineage behind Nakamura's poster-flat, outlined-shape aesthetic.
- Snow White (Betty Boop) (1933) — Fleischer's rubber-hose metamorphosis set to Cab Calloway's rotoscoped song is the ur-model for musical numbers where bodies liquefy and transform in time to music, a mode Night Is Short revives for its drinking-contest and used-book fair set pieces.
- Kick-Heart (2013) — The Kickstarter short where Yuasa built the Flash/Adobe-Animate vector pipeline (soon Science Saru) that lets a single artist tween sinuous, elastic full-scene motion — the very Flash-hybrid technology powering Night Is Short's crowd choreography.
- Paprika (2006) — Kon's match-cut subjective editing — impossible transitions stitched on gesture, color or object so dream-logic reads as continuous space, climaxing in a swelling parade — is the montage grammar Night Is Short shares for its escalating nocturnal procession.
- The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) — Takahata's exposed-charcoal-line, flat watercolor 'unfinished' look treats the white of the paper as space — a contemporaneous push toward graphic flatness over rendered depth that parallels the poster-flat staging here.
- Ping Pong the Animation (2014) — Extends the same rubber-limbed distortion and comic-panel split-screen editing — multiple simultaneous frames and warped perspective conveying interior state — that Night Is Short uses to fracture a single night across many vignettes.
- Lu Over the Wall (2017) — Released the same year from Science Saru, it deploys the identical Flash-tweened fluid-body animation and structures itself around musical numbers where the whole ensemble is swept into dance.
- Devilman Crybaby (2018) — Carries forward the Flash-hybrid elastic figures and subjective-time editing into rave/party montages where a single night dilates and distorts, a darker application of Night Is Short's nocturnal-time device.
- Ride Your Wave (2019) — Builds a whole feature around a recurring musical motif with water animated as pliable, character-like matter — the song-as-structural-spine and liquid plasticity inherited directly from Night Is Short's numbers.
- Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020) — Literalizes the same principle — imagination rendered as rubber-limbed, medium-shifting animation erupting into flat reality — turning Night Is Short's fantastical asides into the show's core device.
- Inu-Oh (2021) — A folklore anthology reworked as a full rock-opera with elongated, boneless dancing bodies staged as flat silhouette spectacle — the folklore-musical-with-elastic-figures lineage of Night Is Short taken to feature-length concert form.
- Kaiba (2008) — Yuasa's round, poster-simple character design and subjective spatial distortion — environments bending to emotional state rather than physical logic — established the flattened, elastic staging vocabulary Night Is Short refines.