Forum - View topicNEWS: GKIDS Streams Clip From 'Night is Short, Walk On Girl' Anime Film
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GeorgeC
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I saw this film at the Columbus Film Festival this past Friday, August 10th.
That's the only date so far they've scheduled it for our area. To be honest, I was not overjoyed with the movie by the time it ended. It was 92 of the longest minutes I've endured of a movie in a VERY long time. It was just not well-paced and has an experimental, surrealist, consciousness of thought narrative style -- in other words, it's typical experimental animation that throws conventional storytelling out the window. I don't generally like feature-length experimental animation. It's good in small doses (upwards of 3 minutes is my limit) but for a film running an hour-and-a-half long it can be torture. It sure doesn't look like typical anime. It's very minimalist, with very little of the traditional shading you associate with anime (and probably about 20% the cost of a normal anime feature for this reason, too). It's almost as if UPA (an animation studio that existed from the 1940s into the 1970s; they're most famous for Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing) hired a Japanese artist specifically to direct one of their films. I didn't hate the graphic style but it's certainly not traditional. It has an industrial look that may put people off to begin with. The problem I had with the film was not its looks (although I prefer minimalist shorts no more than 8 minutes long versus a feature-length film done this way). I've seen surrealist films before that worked better for me -- the original Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, and older borderline surrealist films like Disney's Alice in Wonderland. "Night is Short" just did not work for me. Oh, the trailer is accurate to the movie, btw. It's literally a girl drinking all night from beginning to end with a series of very strange characters. Now, she doesn't get into ACTUAL trouble which is very unreal but it's also not exactly a compelling narrative when the male lead is a weenie chasing after her to confess but never manages this during the entire night! Yeah, it's the quintessential Japanese anime romance trope most veteran fans have seen played out a mllion times in romantic TV and feature films. It's as boring and unsatisfying as it was the first time you saw it played through! So, no, I didn't like the film that much. I liked Lu Over the Wall, a later film by the same director, much better. I haven't seen Mind Game yet... I might rent it beforehand. Masaaki Yuasa's style is very unconventional and it's something I'm reluctant to invest in without seeing the movie first. I had much fewer problems with Satoshi Kon but he was capable of telling coherent stories, too, and I never felt as anxious sitting in my seat watching one of his films. Kon never failed to impress me and he's one of the few directors in live-action or animation that I can say that for! I literally checked my watch 3 or 4 times during "Night is Short" and that's not a good sign for the pacing. I also dozed off for at least 5-10 minutes. That doesn't normally happen for me! Again, "Night is Short" is not the longest film and there were definitely some issues in it... |
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