The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017, Masaaki Yuasa) (Patreon)

63/100

Resisted this for a while—the first 10 minutes, in particular, are a tad daunting, with the subtitles tossing out unfamiliar-to-me Japanese words (senpai, otome, tengu), which I would dutifully look up, and the whole vibe clearly assuming warm familiarity with a world about which I know zilch. (Apparently, Night Is Short is another of those "spiritual sequels," in this case to an 11-episode TV series called The Tatami Galaxy.) Gradually, though, the sheer unrelenting demented absurdity wore me down. Yuasa wildly exaggerates the standard anime aesthetic, distorting not just facial features but basic physical actions: When characters drink (and there's Hong-level drinking throughout; the female lead, who seems to be maybe 19, spends the entire movie on an insane bender), the liquid expands their entire bodies as it speedily moves from throat to esophagus to stomach to intestines, creating a split-second ballooning effect. There's always something arresting to look at, though it's sometimes hard to pay attention because what's happening on the narrative level at that moment is totally fucking bonkers. I think it was when a small vampiric-looking boy gets revealed as the vindictively protective God Of Used Book Markets, seeking to retrieve beloved tomes from the hands of greedy collectors and get them back in circulation, that I just surrendered to the lunacy; you'd think it'd be tough to fit that alongside a traveling guerrilla theater production written by a dude who's using it, Hamlet-style, to find the woman he loves, who was hit on the head by a falling apple at the same moment that he was, but somehow it all comes together, sort of, in a way that Miyazaki's random bizarre elements never do—probably because these are all explicitly comic and don't imply some deeper meaning. Like, there's a demi-god who shows up on a magic three-level train and gets challenged by our nameless heroine to a drinking contest, but nothing comes of that, really. It's just one in a series of goofy adventures over the course of what's actually, title notwithstanding, a night so long that it seems as if it might never end. 

To be sure, there is a conventional romantic story arc here, though it doesn't much appeal to me. The unnamed young man who pines for the unnamed young woman gets introduced as a stalker, essentially, and never subsequently seems to become worthy of her attention; his nocturnal adventures involve a lot of genital- and underwear-based humiliation (one of my early notes reads "weird emphasis on alcohol and underwear"; this was before the film's true oddity had become apparent), and are generally too juvenile for my taste. (I do, however, appreciate the technical virtuosity of a frantic late sequence that visualizes the dude's panic attack as a conference in which thousands of silhouetted mini-dudes argue about what to do next, as if countering an impending nuclear strike.) Indeed, my investment in these two crazy kids finally coming together was so minimal that it felt to me as if the film peaked roughly half an hour before it ends, when Don Underwear (see!) and the woman who I guess is the stage manager of his guerrilla theater company get hit on the head by falling carp simultaneously (nicely planted detail btw), allowing this lovelorn gal to replace the unknown woman (since revealed as a cross-dressing man—not a trans man, I'm fairly sure) as his silly obsession. The whole business about everyone in the city catching a cold seemed anticlimactic, its thematic import notwithstanding. Still, at its most inspired, Night Is Short reminded me of Yellow Submarine more than it did any previous anime that I've seen—it's not explicitly psychedelic, but it shares psychedelia's penchant for freewheeling anything-goes anarchy. Few of my friends appear to have seen this, which surprises me, and I'd strongly encourage y'all to check it out (on Max as I write this). You shan't forget it.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: The definite article frequently gets omitted—just Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. That's apparently the English-language title in most other countries, but GKIDS sensibly added the "The" in the U.S. (Also note that "On" is capitalized because it's an adverb, not a preposition. The girl is not being walked upon. It's "Walk On By, not "Walk on By.")