Happy Machine
Reality is not all it seems in this journey into an alternative existence filled with bizarre creatures.
16'
Japan
IFFR 2023
It is a night of endless festivity, charged with possibilities. An unnamed female student at Kyoto University takes baby steps out of her comfort zone, hopping between bars, meeting shady street personalities and gate-crashing parties with strangers. The evening is also an opportunity for the nerdy senior secretly courting her to confess his feelings. But between them stands a host of outlandish characters: an erotica-collecting wine connoisseur, a senile moneylending overlord, a persistent book imp, a cross-dressing heartthrob and a modern knight who wouldn’t change his underwear.
In Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, Yuasa Masaaki concocts a nutty dark comedy that unfolds like a two-character video game, with its young leads put through a series of extraordinary challenges they must complete to attain their goals. The film’s hyperbolic style, featuring elastic animated figures, simplified silhouettes, flat colour fields, split screens, on-screen texts, fourth-wall-breaking voiceovers and a foreboding soundtrack dovetail perfectly with the promising nocturnal setting of the story.
Partly an allegory of the journey into adulthood and partly an alcohol-induced trip into the night, Yuasa’s singular film radically alters the campus rom-com format, spiralling outward in increasing insanity, with formal distortions that are as hallucinatory as the plot developments. College romance has never been as surreal.
– Srikanth Srinivasan
Film stills: ©Tomihiko Morimi,KADOKAWA/NAKAME COMMITTEE
IFFR 2023
Programme IFFR 2023
When, at IFFR 2018, Yuasa Masaaki's Night Is Short, Walk On Girl screened, audiences and critics alike went wild with delight and wonder. Now, apropos his latest work, INU-OH, IFFR is proud to present the internationally first extensive retrospective of a modern master who, since his first efforts in the 90s as a storyboard artist and episode director, developed into one of world cinema's most inventive and constantly surprising animation auteurs.
Recurring topics of transformation, self-expression, and love are exemplary of Yuasa's oeuvre – complemented with an animation style that characteristically favours movement and emotions that feel both authentic and real. In series like The Tatami Galaxy (2010) or Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020), as well as films like Lu Over the Wall (2017) or Ride Your Wave (2019), Yuasa's filmmaking combines the surreal with the cute, the socially conscious with flights of fancy, the visually staggeringly experimental with the narratively classical. IFFR is proud to celebrate a creative mind that, like few others, knows how to fuse the popular with the avant-garde.
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16'
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IFFR 2023
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