Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
2017 · Masaaki Yuasa
For when you want pure joy — a colorful, funny, romantic rush that leaves you buzzing, perfect for a late night when sleep can wait. Comfort viewing for people who like their comfort a little unhinged.
What it's about
One long, impossible night in Kyoto: a cheerfully unstoppable college junior — known only as the Girl with Black Hair — drinks her way through the city's bars, wanders a used-book fair, and stumbles into guerrilla street theatre, meeting eccentrics at every turn. Trailing behind her is Senpai, an older student so smitten he keeps engineering absurd 'coincidental' run-ins, hoping tonight is finally the night she notices him. The city itself seems to bend to the evening's logic, the hours stretching and snapping like taffy.
The experience
Giddy, fast, and gorgeously drunk — the animation warps and blooms with every cocktail, and the film sprints from one setpiece to the next with the energy of a party you don't want to end. Underneath the mayhem there's a real sweetness that sneaks up on you.
The craft
Masaaki Yuasa animates like nobody else working: rubber-limbed figures, poster-flat colors that lurch and dilate with the night's intoxication, and character designs by Yusuke Nakamura that look like indie record sleeves come to life. It's hand-drawn expressionism doing what photorealism can't — making you feel time speeding up and slowing down. The brighter the screen, the better; the palette is half the pleasure.
Why it matters
A cult favorite that cemented Yuasa and his studio Science SARU as the standard-bearers of Japanese animation's experimental wing, and a companion piece to his beloved series The Tatami Galaxy that brought his style to a wider audience.
Reception & legacy: how Night Is Short, Walk On Girl was received, argued over, and remembered →
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.