OXFORD UNIVERSITY ANIME SOCIETY
Review:
Night Is Short,Walk On Girl.
Yoru wa Mijikashi Aruke yo Otome.
The Anisoc Reviewer
7/10/23
Author's note: This film was screened at the Magdalen College as a collaboration between Oxford FilmSoc and AniSoc. In the future, a review will be published by the Anisoc Reviewer for every collaborative screening organized by the two societies.
Heralded as one of the modern auteurs of anime, the dynamism of Masaaki Yuasa’s animation precedes his reputation. His studio, Science SARU, is the equivalent of what Studio Ghibli is to the celebrated Miyazaki. Yuasa visualizes sequences and patterns, translating seemingly inarticulate visions into intricate storytelling. In the artistry of his animation we travel not only through literal spaces but, more often than not, through the phantasmagoric headspaces of different characters.
The film’s setting is familiar. The kaleidoscopic campus of Kyoto University is one we’ve encountered before, crafted in Yuasa’s anime series The Tatami Galaxy. In Night Is Short, nonetheless, its occupants are delightfully new. The female protagonist of this coming-of-age carnival embarks on a night of fearless experience and revelation. Wonders and disastrous incidents collide into her orbit. Around her the night stretches on, and on—until it reaches the edge of an abyss that is not quite forever.
Yuasa is driven, above all, to capture the sublime purity of an experience through animation on screen. Transformation is a frequent motif in Night is Short. Colors and abstractions explode across the screen, projecting the characters’ inner mindscapes onto their physical surroundings. The youths of Kyoto University find themselves transformed by the thriving instability of their surroundings. A bloated puff of tobacco smoke melds into a koi fish. Clocks run backwards at lightning speed. Concentrated intakes of spicy nabe prompts hallucinations of giant toads. An antiques books fair becomes an underwater haven as its occupants are untethered from gravity. The sky rains apples. Secrets are spilled. As impossibilities blossom into reality, personas are also irrevocably transformed.
Yuasa’s eccentric cast of characters are each hopeless and hopelessly charismatic. Their namelessness does not dampen their charisma. The otome is extraordinary, persistently unchanged by the mundane world around her. She is immune to the flu that cripples the rest of the town, immune to the self-pity that holds others captive. She is optimism and joy. She walks with her eyes only ahead, ceaselessly dazzled by the wonders in her path. Senpai, her bumbling admirer, walks a thin line between love and lust, between admiration and idolization. The School Festival Director is a smug, mischievous delight, deploying his organization with such ruthless efficiency that we almost forget he carries his own insecurities. Don Underwear lives a boisterous fantasy, enacting musicals all over town in search of an enigmatic lover and thriving on the allure of supposedly fateful romances. The old and formidable Rihaku looms over the shifting crowds like a rumor, shadowed by his own solitude. The God of the Old Books Market, a treacherous, Ozu-faced creature of wisdom, delivers witty insight with a fiendish grin. The dynamic duo from The Tatami Galaxy, Higuchi and Hanuki, breeze through crooked streets and alleyways, stirring whirlpools of chaos in their wake.
The film plays with distances. The physical and metaphorical distances between human beings are breached repeatedly. The otome and Rihaku conjoin in a drinking competition, as this communal act allows their vividly different headspaces to contrast. Generations are not segregated. The young and the old interact as they perform the dance rituals passed down through generations. The difference between them does not hinder the otome from later reaching out and bringing the older man out of his seclusion. The journey through the hurricane as the otome finally reaches the isolated senpai is enacted on both literal and metaphysical levels. Yuasa places a disquisition on the interconnectedness of humans and portrays the attempts we make to connect with another.
Just like its precedent, The Tatami Galaxy, the film is about youth. Through its kaleidoscopic depiction of university life, Night Is Short depicts the experience of being young. To be young is to be mindlessly, restlessly miserable, for there is a kind of misery and insecurity that only youth can embody. To be young is to be alone: to stare into the vast void of solitude and believe yourself on its precipice, to wallow in the meager consolation of your loneliness. To be young is to be in lust. To be young is to be greedy—for glass after glass of alcohol, for page after page of knowledge. To be young is to be full of wonder, to drink in the world with a hunger for every detail because no momentary thrill can bring enough satisfaction. To be young is to be whimsical. But to be young is also to be on the cusp of a constant, exhilarating uncertainty. It is liquor and festivals and self-hatred and fear; it is the fragility of friendships and first loves. To Yuasa, the space between adolescence and adulthood is full of endless possibility. This experience of youth is precious and profoundly touching—and in such rare moments, it can also be mind-blowingly beautiful.
Night Is Short, Walk On Girl takes its protagonists on a journey across Kyoto University to reach a space where dream and aspirations collide—and where reality and imagination can finally meet. Life is terrible, and exhilarating, and overwhelming, and scary, and delightful. Nothing is certain. The slightest collision can throw the wide world into nothing but spin. We cling only to moments, and the joy of losing oneself in the spur of such a moment is glorious and electrifying. The night is miscellaneous, ripe with so many flavors that we can only hold onto a single fleeting taste no matter how hard we try. In all of youth’s terror and splendor, Yuasa seeks to capture the overwhelming, the ineffable. Be it dream or nightmare, the possibilities of Yuasa’s world are endless—and the consequences tantalizingly uncertain.