Telling detail and offbeat humour abound in Liu Jian’s wittily drawn, Tarantino-esque flick
At 78 minutes, Liu Jian’s animation Have a Nice Day is like a very long short film, or a preliminary sketch for a more substantial feature about gangland lowlife in the manner of a Chinese Tarantino. It’s an elegantly and wittily drawn piece of work, the design being clear, simple, sometimes almost two-dimensional, foregrounding droll and telling detail: it could almost function as a storyboard cartoon for a live-action version.
The dialogue itself is coolly and cleverly allusive, bringing in references to Trump, Brexit and the bull market in contemporary Chinese art. Xiao Zhang (Changlong Zhu) is a construction site worker who does some courier work for a local mobster, Uncle Liu (Yang Siming). One day he rashly steals a large amount of money so that he can take his fiancée to South Korea and...
At 78 minutes, Liu Jian’s animation Have a Nice Day is like a very long short film, or a preliminary sketch for a more substantial feature about gangland lowlife in the manner of a Chinese Tarantino. It’s an elegantly and wittily drawn piece of work, the design being clear, simple, sometimes almost two-dimensional, foregrounding droll and telling detail: it could almost function as a storyboard cartoon for a live-action version.
The dialogue itself is coolly and cleverly allusive, bringing in references to Trump, Brexit and the bull market in contemporary Chinese art. Xiao Zhang (Changlong Zhu) is a construction site worker who does some courier work for a local mobster, Uncle Liu (Yang Siming). One day he rashly steals a large amount of money so that he can take his fiancée to South Korea and...
- 3/23/2018
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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