Night Is Short, Walk On Girl

• Japanese: 夜は短し歩けよ乙女, Hepburn: Yoru wa Mijikashi Aruke yo Otome
• Directed by Masaaki Yuasa
• April 7, 2017
• Based on the 2006 novel The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl written by Tomihiko Morimi and illustrated by Yusuke Nakamura

Voice cast

• Senior-Gen Hoshino / Kellen Goff
• The Girl with Black Hair-Kana Hanazawa / Jackie Lastra
• The School Festival Executive Head-Hiroshi Kamiya / Eddy Lee
• The Underpants Leader (Don Underwear)-Ryuji Akiyama / Patrick Seitz
• Seitarō Higuchi-Kazuya Nakai / Paul Guyet
• Hanuki-san-Yuko Kaida / Carrie Keranen
• The God of the Old Books Market-Hiroyuki Yoshino / Dino Andrade
• Kiko-san-Seiko Niizuma / Jennifer Roberts
• Nise-Jōgasaki-Junichi Suwabe / Michael Sinterniklaas
• Princess Daruma-Aoi Yuki / Stephanie Sheh
• Johnny-Nobuyuki Hiyama / Ben Pronsky
• Tōdō-san-Kazuhiro Yamaji / Doug Erholtz
• Rihaku Mugihito-Frank Todaro

In Kyoto, a college sophomore has a series of unusual adventures with the local nightlife while unaware of the romantic feelings of a classmate. He’s a sweet stalker.

Night Is Short, Walk On Girl was a blind purchase with little to no idea what I was going to get beyond the enticing promises on the packaging. I went in expecting something attempting to be deep that was a slice of life even if it was a bit of a fantastical slice of life film. What I got was barely attempted animation and obnoxious characters. Worse I got a story that I quickly lost interest in making trying to finish this quite the slog.

It’s heavy on exaggerated reactions. I expected one or two supporting characters to have over-the-top expressions. That is practically a given but when they all do it? Worse it’s in just about every scene. It doesn’t make it funny or cute. It makes it annoying.

Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Maybe it’s what passes for edgy in Japan. There is one character that starts begging for underwear to borrow because he is lacking pants and a guy in an apartment says sure he’ll share his underwear but he’s got to have a drink with him too. Huh? How is that even close to normal. I don’t know. No matter how desperate I was for a pair of pants or anything I would not do that because it just strikes me as weird and possibly risky in a Jeffrey Dahmer way. Then we have another character who’s described as beautiful and dresses up as a woman to trick men before breaking their heart. Transgender catfishing?

These unique elements certainly provided a hook for me to keep watching. I was just trying to understand them, but they didn’t aid in my enjoyment of the movie. It was more along the lines of watching something collapse and you didn’t know how it would end up. Not necessarily entertaining, but there is a level of curiosity to watch until the end.

The story tries to focus on life and love and it accomplishes some of that but some of the tropes used in this like the aforementioned exaggerator reactions just make it difficult to view. We even get cutaways that I assume are for humor but just break the movies weak flow.

The character of Senpai is obsessed with the main female character. That’s not bad. Where it gets bad as he’s taken up stalking behavior to cross her path as often as possible to the point he knows just about everything she does and where she’ll be and when she’ll be there. I watch plenty of murder shows and such behavior never ends well in real life for the focus of it. Even if the ultimate disposition of that behavior was not murder it’s still not cute because it is classic stalker and manipulator behavior. But he’s just so in love he doesn’t know what to do and that makes it cute in this movie. That’s what they want you to perceive it as.

It’s like they were stretching out a very thin narrative into an unnecessarily long movie. I think this could’ve been half the length and been a much better story. This as a spiritual successor to The Tatami Galaxy which I haven’t seen so perhaps that is part of my issue but I doubt it since it’s not an official sequel. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl doesn’t appear to require any viewing of that to view this.

I said earlier, it was barely animated and by that I mean it doesn’t have the same level of detail other Japanese animation has. It’s not the disturbingly detailed environments where it would take several dozen viewings of the film to see everything. They are more like quick sketches or rough ideas.

Night Is Short, Walk On Girl went on too long and got too stupid. I think this will appeal to the connoisseur of Japanese animation but to the general audience they will walk on.