A vivid, batty, whirlwind of a film in Masaaki Yuasa’s wildly imaginative style…
The night is most definitely not short in Masaaki Yuasa’s adaption of Tomihiko Morimi’s bestselling novel of the same name. The second time he has adapted Morimi’s work after The Tatami Galaxy series in 2010, Yuasa brings his wild imagination to a romantic comedy (of sorts) that reflects its characters 21st modernity, while stylistically echoing back to both Japanese and European animation of the 70s. A vivid, batty, whirlwind of a film, that often rushes through jokes and references, but occasionally drops pace so far as to risk getting stuck on lesser ideas.
Here we find the generically named Senpai (Gen Hoshino, Saint Young Men, Love & Peace), obsessed with one woman but too scared to opening admit his feelings. Instead he plots to be everywhere she goes in the hope she will see their accumulation of ‘coincidental’ encounters as fate telling them they should be together. Unsurprisingly it hasn’t worked.
The object of his affections? The equally detachedly-named Kuro Kami no Otome (literally ‘The Girl with the Black Hair’, voiced by Kana Hanazawa, Durarara!, Nisekoi). A fantastically gusty young woman, able to drink conceited men under the table, deal out the ‘gentle fist’ to KO the advances of unpleasant letches, memorise play scripts in a glance, ‘choo-choos’ like the train in her favourite childhood book, and adopt a ‘Sophist dance’ that impresses the seniors that first used it. Well, who wouldn’t fall for that?
As She embarks on the longest night of her life in Kyoto, encompassing pub crawls, book fairs, festivals and musical theatre(!), not to mention the mother of all storms, Senpai decides to pull out all the stops to finally win her over. Even if that still means not actually just coming out with his feelings. As the night wears on, the pair run into various characters again and again, from the God of the Old Book Market to various members of a Shunga (Japanese erotic art) appreciation society, who alternatingly both help and hinder their plans.
In the wake of the phenomenal success of Your Name, which even brought its golden touch to UK box office figures, Anime Limited continue to explore the wealth of Japanese animated features that don’t fit the usual science fiction or children’s films with another limited release slated UK cinemas. Sure enough there are some more adult themes on display. While these are largely not particularly explicit, you can’t help but wonder if these might play havoc with the final age rating – at least from the BBFC in the UK, where they tend to be far stricter in their rulings. I doubt there’ll be much leniency for what can be construed as ‘glorifying’ alcohol consumption. This means it might get pushed to higher than (very) young adult audience that this would benefit from, though it’s true that there are far wider audiences for anime now than there were in decades past, as generations have grown up on Pokémon and Dragon Ball.
His first theatrical feature in the fourteen years since Mind Game, with work on various series including Kemonozume, Ping Pong and the crowd funded short film Kick-Heart, Masaaki Yuasa brings a wild and fluid, if somewhat chaotic style to the story. It can be hard to keep up with the references that seem to pour out of Yuasa’s overactive brain, that that impairs little on the humour of the characters and their situations. But it’s partly because of that pace that when it drops, such as when we get stuck in Senpai’s brain – which feels more like Woody Allen’s final sequence in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) than Pixar’s Inside Out – that you really start to notice the film drag, even at just 93 minutes.
Yuasa’s style is wonderfully imaginative. The characters may talk smart phones and technology, but his often-stylised rendering recalls the work of 60s and 70s animators René Laloux, Eiichi Yamamoto, Masaaki Ōsumi and Robert Balser. There’s a quirkiness to how they are portrayed that easy doesn’t feel like anything else you might see from anime today, and makes the film immediately far more visually interesting than those contemporaries. (Some reviewers have noted the juxtoposition of traditional Japanese cultural elements and objects, such as the daruma dolls and Kyoto’s beautiful traditionally-housed Gion district, and the very western references like cocktail bars – but I’m not convinced. Aren’t these seeming contradictions just a part of everyday life in Japan?)
Sadly, the real sticking point comes from the character of Senpai. Possibly a problem inherited from the original work: he’s just not particularly sympathetic or likeable. Kuro Kami no Otome is portrayed as friendly and selfless, often helping others at the drop of a hat, and yet beyond that seems rather flat. Senpai, on the other hand, is shown to be completely self-involved, exploiting situations around him simply to get to his goal – getting into Kuro Kami’s affections – but feels more fully executed. Though not uncommon for comedies (anime and otherwise) – Urusei Yatsura’s obnoxious Ataru springs most readily springs to mind – it creates an imbalance in the narrative. This reveals the narrative balance as far more male-led.
And you also wonder just what she might see in him? The effect is that you are left not wanting the pair to hook up, rather obliterating the so-called ‘romance’ of the film. Come on, Kuro Kami no Otome can do so much better!