DRAWN TO DEATH
Chinese animation gets cool with Liu Jian’s film noir…
Ihaven’t seen many animation films,” says Liu Jian, “but from my knowledge I haven’t seen anything like this.” The Chinese director of Have A Nice Day isn’t far wrong, either. Light years from Pixar or Studio Ghibli fantasias, this second movie from Liu, after 2010’s Piercing I, is a hand-drawn cross between the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.
Certainly these influences – notably the Coens’ No Country For Old Men and QT’s Pulp Fiction – loom large in a lurid story set in a shabby small town in southern China, where a stolen bag of cash leads to murder and mayhem. “I’m a big fan of genre film,” says Liu, “so when I make animations, I want to make animated genre films.”
Liu’s movie also makes up-to-date references to everything from Trump to Brexit,
something he felt was essential with many Chinese students heading to the UK for education. “For many years, Europe [has been] the centre of global culture,” he says. “If the UK leaves Europe, does it mean that the UK is becoming a country on the margins?” Ouch.
Surprisingly, Liu did “95 per cent of the animation” himself, across three years. The film may be a brisk 74 minutes, and the drawings simply styled, but that’s still a lot of work. “I learned Chinese painting in school, so animation is very easy for me,” he shrugs (he graduated from the Nanjing University of the Arts in 1993).
After forming Le-joy Animation Studio in 2007, Liu has kept things minimalist. “There are only two people in the studio – me and my wife [producer Lynne Wang],” he says. It’s an artisan set-up that clearly works well. “I’m going to continue and make more films in this style,” he says. So no live-action plans? He shakes his head. “I want to stick to animation.”
ETA | 23 MARCH / HAVE A NICE DAY STREAMS ON MUBI NEXT MONTH.