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 pay a professional surgeon there to fix the botched cosmetic surgery that the poor young woman has had done locally. The gang boss himself, who is currently torturing a childhood friend and aspiring artist over some petty dispute, immediately despatches a hitman called Skinny (Ma Xiaofeng) to grab this kid and get the money back, but the thief is – a little confusingly – waylaid by someone else, a strange man with futuristic x-ray glasses.
It all involves repeated bizarre stopovers at a scuzzy hotel, an internet cafe, and various other locations, and it’s sometimes not immediately obvious where the money has gone. But this movie has real deadpan style and an offbeat sense of humour: one character’s yearning to live in a new residential development called Shangri-La is the cue for a dreamlike karaoke video on the subject. There is incidentally some tremendous music from the Shanghai Restoration Project.