Have a Nice Day

Hair seems to be a big deal in the world of dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion. Water too. Both stand as kind of final boss lev­el for this rapid­ly-evolv­ing visu­al form. The 2010 Dis­ney film Tan­gled felt like a show­piece for immac­u­late indi­vid­ual hair strand ren­der­ing and 2013’s Frozen did the same for water and ice. But once you’ve per­fect­ed flow­ing locks and the mel­liflu­ous motion of liq­uid, then what next?

Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day proves that, in ani­ma­tion, the way for­ward might just be less rather than more. Not so much a move away from pho­to­re­al­ism, but a chance to take stock at what makes the ani­mat­ed mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion unique.

This dead­pan noir rounde­lay does away with the detail that doesn’t mat­ter – the skin, the tex­ture, the god­damned hair fol­li­cles – and is mil­i­tant­ly selec­tive about, per Mar­tin Scorsese’s dic­tum, what is in and what is out of the frame. It’s an impres­sion­is­tic idea of what a place should look like, and the smoothed-over, gueril­la-style ani­ma­tion tech­nique offers a per­fect mir­ror of the story’s down-and-out milieu.

For instance, there’s a scene set inside a Chi­nese night owl inter­net café, and Jian care­ful­ly trans­mits an atmos­phere of lack­adaisi­cal seed­i­ness through his care­ful visu­al­i­sa­tions. Chipped blank walls are adorned with crap­py posters over­look­ing com­i­cal­ly basic com­put­er ter­mi­nals. The sales assis­tant is over­come by after-hours tor­por. It’s rare to see stark min­i­mal­ism used in such a way, as a large blocks of sol­id colour don’t usu­al­ly scan in ani­ma­tion. Not so here, as Jian is like a mas­ter pro­duc­tion design­er who curates detail as a way to help the view­er intu­it the big­ger picture.

Have a Nice Day revolves around two-bit hood Xiao, who, with earnest­ness to burn, decides to vio­lent­ly rob a stash of mon­ey from his own boss and then chan­nel the pro­ceeds into a trip to South Korea for plas­tic surgery. Not for him, mind, but his unseen girl­friend who won’t leave her apart­ment because of a botched facelift. It swift­ly tran­spires that Xiao is not a clever man, and he leaves a neon-glow­ing paper trail behind him, lead­ing to said inter­net café. Thank­ful­ly for him, the gang­sters sent out to retrieve the mon­ey aren’t much brighter, and this appar­ent­ly basic action becomes more con­trived and absurd with each new twist.

Char­ac­ters pile up, as do the mis­un­der­stand­ings. Vio­lence is met­ed out often in con­fu­sion rather than for a refined pur­pose, and the film and events con­spire to leave Xiao breath­ing (albeit bare­ly) as the corpses pile up in his wake. The film’s dune-dry sense of humour and intense longueurs – most­ly the result of stu­pe­fac­tion rather than char­ac­ters pos­sess­ing any sense of dra­ma – recall Jim Jarmusch’s ear­ly years in which fly-blown slack­ers sit around wait­ing for their lives to begin.

Made inde­pen­dent­ly in Chi­na and sub­ject to the country’s strin­gent cen­sor­ship restric­tions, Have a Nice Day’s com­i­cal­ly bleak depic­tion of its dead-end land­scape is the only ele­ment you might chalk up as local cri­tique. Its cen­tral the­sis – that romance is dead and so are we all – feels pret­ty uni­ver­sal, all told.

Have a Nice Day is released in select cin­e­mas on 23 March. Join The Shang­hai Restora­tion Project, MUBI and Lit­tle White Lies at the Gen­e­sis Cin­e­ma on 22 March for a spe­cial screen­ing and after-film pan­el discussion.