out of every single movie i've ever seen this is absolutely the number one film i can say that i'm able to connect to on an emotional level. every single feeling of anxiety, uncertainty, triumph, laugh, or literally any other sentiment that's expressed from the characters in this film feels so absolutely real and realized that it sometimes blows my mind to think that i'm watching an animated film...and what an achievement that animation is.

the fluidity and exaggeration that yuasa is able to express in his animation is honestly a marvel to watch, making his characters just pop with life. an example of this that i adore is whenever a character eats or drinks anything, their entire body expands…

The Anime Marches On! Challenge (9/26)
Five Anime Films from the 2010s (2/5)

A fun, colorful, and unrepentant celebration of drinking to excess, Night is Short, Walk on Girl is speaking a much different cinematic language than the usual anime feature, and is something of a sharp departure from the genre's artistic style.

By utilizing boxy flashes of clashing color tones, the visual style is almost like the opening credits sequence of a 60's Hollywood comedy with an anime twist, all while channeling the highly quirky western aesthetic of Amélie or a Wes Anderson film. Our two leads in this wild mess are the Girl with Black Hair, a manic pixie dream girl undergrad with superhero powers of drinking, and…

In my experience, a common way of describing Tatami Galaxy is that it adapts a stream-of-consciousness mode of presentation to animation. That is, its way of visualizing all the little, tangential relations in the main character's mind or accenting the specific elements of given events that stick out to him helps the viewer experience the world as it corresponds with the motions of a mind. This is a little more interesting. Its style is similar in many respects, but both because of its structure and its (much more likeable) main character's disposition, "stream-of-consciousness" doesn't adequately describe it.

The mental motions and relations on display in this movie, unlike in Tatami Galaxy, aren't contained in one character. Many unique perspectives are…

This film is just non-stop. It breathlessly careens forward, focusing on a sort of stock character (a young woman with dark hair, short skirts, and a simple desire for drinking alcohol and reading books, which is a little bit magical pixie), and melding surreal dreamlike elaborations of life into the dull world of reality. Because really it's about a slightly creepy intense older guy hitting on this girl (the least effective of all plots, and the least satisfying of the storylines, even if she has a fine line in punching dudes), but where it's successful is the way it expands this world out into a kaleidoscopic fantasy of colours and light and madcap nonsense. There's a drinking contest, and carps…

Yuasa has really done it here. It appears that, using the characters built in Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei as a background, Yuasa has built a truly excellent film. Again, fate takes a central role here, with the red string of fate becoming a constant visual trope. The film deconstructs time, taking place in a single night ‘that may have lasted a year.’ Yuasa keeps the conflict up in this film, conjuring up farce after farce for the Raven-Haired Girl: the film acts as both a journey towards her past and into her future. The visuals of the film move back and forth between dream-like and a realism that’s so flat it can’t feel real. Indeed, the two-dimensionality of characters sometimes feels…

You know when there’s a recipe for a fairly common dish, and you come across a spice that doesn’t require you to change the rest of the dish but still gives you a very refreshing result? And with time you use so much of that spice, with the addition of others perhaps, that you forget there was supposed to be actual food besides them?

I doubt the reader has been through that exactly, but it’s about what director Masaaki Yuasa does with Yoru wa mijikashi aruke yo otome.
For enough time to make half of a relatively short film feel infinite, he bottles up all of his found spices—his trademark originalities that inevitably transform the simplest of premises into a…