night is short, walk on girl (2017)
"it's more than a physical time capsule, it's not just scenery and disappearing buildings, but its also people in those places"
the raven-haired girl's night takes many different directions without ever becoming boring. in fact, the film does the exact opposite: it's actually quite funny to sit and watch the hours taking various shapes in a haze-like manner while you're also being introduced to everyone that shows up in this story as a direct consequence of the protagonist's dérive (a word i've been trying to avoid, but now that i'm here thinking about it, it's almost impossible not to compare the raven-haired girl's approach of welcoming every minor happenstance as the magical works of the threads of fate with the french situationist's dérive). in walkscapes: walking as an aesthetic practice, francesco careri describes a psychogeographical dérive as "the means with which to strip the city naked, but also with which to construct a playful way of reclaiming its territory: the city is a toy to be utilized at one's pleasure, a space for collective living, for the experience of alternative behaviors, a place in which to waste useful time so as to transform it into playful-constructive time". this is exactly what everyone in this movie is doing, embracing the ever-changing nature of this particular night in kyoto.
i was completely unprepared for pretty much everything masaaki yuasa offered me here. which, in this case, only means to say that watching it without knowing what to expect was a huge delight, and each time a new place or character appeared the movie kept my undivided attention (something that rarely ever happens). another feeling that progressively grew within me was the odd sensation that the way this story is visually presented is an almost scarily-precisive compilation of experimentation with animation i'd like to try my finger at someday. the movie constantly shifts the way that portrays its stories, and this makes the night seem like it lasted many weeks. this turns out to be something that works strongly in its favour: between pub crawling, crashing parties, going to used books fairs, staging a guerrilla theatre musical, and accepting whatever comes next, seems almost right that you should be left wondering about the duration of these events (the clocks! i really had to say something, anything, about the clocks!) without ever getting a precise answer.
very heart-warming while also strangely relatable in some aspects (the rhetoric party and cowboy fight scenes are way much familiar than i'd like them to be). this probably will become something i'll revisit a lot in the future! as of now the rest of my feelings are still trying to untangle themselves while i'm thinking about the many stories this movie provided me.