Masaaki Yuasa’s Elastic, Fantastic Anime

The animation of Masaaki Yuasa is singular in the sense that we have seen nothing truly like it, yet it would not exist without its anxiety of influences.

From his early profane masterpiece Mind Game to the more recently spirited and liquid Night Is Short Walk On Girl and Lu Over The Wall, Yuasa’s cinema is mandatory for scholar and bottomless for geeks.

From the visionary mind of director Masaaki Yuasa comes a free-wheeling comedy about one epic night in Kyoto.

As a group of teens go out for a night on the town, a sophomore known only as “The Girl with Black Hair” experiences a series of surreal encounters with the local nightlife… all the while unaware of the romantic longings of Senpai, a fellow student who has been creating increasingly fantastic and contrived reasons to run into her, in an effort to win her heart. Featuring boundless imagination and visual wit, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl is a celebration of the unconventional, confusing routes that life and love can take, from one of the most exciting voices in anime today.

From the visionary mind of Yuasa comes a joyous twist on the classic fairy tale about a little mermaid who comes ashore to join a middle-school rock band and propel them to fame.

After his family moves from Tokyo to a small fishing village, teenager Kai spends his days sulking and adrift. When his classmates invite him to play keyboard in their band, their jam sessions bring an unexpected guest: Lu, a young mermaid whose fins turn to feet when she hears the beats, and whose singing causes humans to compulsively dance. But when an ancient prophecy threatens Lu and the village, Kai and his new friends must save the day in this toe-tapping adventure for the entire family.

Yuasa’s first feature film Mind Game is a boundary-pushing tale that embodies the 1960s and 70s acid animation. The rarely seen film comes to the US for the first time with this release.

Buckle in and prepare to surrender yourself to an exhilarating and wildly entertaining ride in this gloriously colorful and unconstrained cult classic. Audiences will begin to grasp what they are in for early on as loser Nishi, too wimpy to try to save his childhood sweetheart from gangsters, is shot in the butt by a soccer-playing psychopath, projecting Nishi into the afterlife. In this limbo, God – shown as a series of rapidly changing characters – tells him to walk toward the light. But Nishi runs like hell in the other direction and returns to Earth a changed man, driven to live each moment to the fullest.