Liu Jian on Tarantino-esque animation Have a Nice Day

“Have a Nice Day is set on the outskirts of a city in Southern China, but the social scene and the living conditions depicted could be anywhere in China.”

On the basis of that analysis, Liu Jian has not gone out of his way to paint an especially flattering picture of his homeland with Have a Nice Day, his second feature film. An animated neo-noir that owes a hefty debt to Quentin Tarantino in terms of its brutal violence, its themes of greed and deception, its air of self-satisfied cool and its ten-to-the-dozen dialogue, it quite literally follows the money across the unnamed city in which the plot unfolds.

It's a town that appears to be in both industrial and moral decay. Construction worker-turned-would-be-mob-driver Xiao Zhang is ostensibly the protagonist, although the real star of the show is the bag of cash that, in a moment of desperation, he ill-advisedly steals at knifepoint in the hope that he can use the one million renminbi ($150,000 in US currency) to pay to send his girlfriend to South Korea for a correctional procedure after botched plastic surgery. A whirlwind of chaos ensues as the money moves across the criminal underworld from one pair of increasingly unscrupulous hands to the next.

Have a Nice Day runs at just 77 minutes and, accordingly, Jian never has the opportunity to pull any punches. The film draws a series of unflattering parallels between the attitude to money in modern China and the rampant Western capitalism to which the country for so long has stood in contrast. The animators seem to take gleeful pleasure in close-up shots of the stolen banknotes, emblazoned as they are with the image of the unimpeachable face of communism, Mao Zedong.

“My first movie had a similar theme,” says Jian of his 2010 animation Piercing I, a similarly bleak treatise on various states of financial desperation. “Money is the most direct and real form of expressing desire. Have a Nice Day uses money as a theme to depict people in different situations seeking their desires and encouraging thinking about humanity itself.” He is quick, however, to point out that he has zeroed in on the least virtuous section of present-day China in the film, and that it shouldn’t necessarily be read as a state-of-the-nation reflection: “I can only really say that Have a Nice Day reflects one aspect of contemporary Chinese society.”

Tonally, the film fluctuates wildly, and on Jian’s part it seems to have been a conscious decision to set it in the grimy surrounds of the part of society that makes its living by illicit means; between icily-executed and grisly murders one minutes and farcical blunders by the crooks the next, he’s allowed himself to narratively swing between the brutally serious and the scythingly witty. “Have a Nice Day uses these dark forces as a theme for the story to create more tension in the film’s narrative, and make the dramatic conflicts seem fun and almost absurd,” he says of having career criminals making up much of the movie’s cast of characters. “Black humour and absurd elements act as a relief to the cold and violent scenes.”

There’s a relentless focus, across the film, on the driving force behind greed being the jealousy of material wealth, something that, as Jian sees it, is beginning to creep into Chinese society. It’s already something that’s widespread in the West, and it does feel as if the director has made the film with one eye on the other side of the world; in an impressively contemporaneous twist, given that the film was completed so soon after the events occurred, Have a Nice Day’s script features caustic references to both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

“It’s a tactic I use all the time,” explains Jian. "Production of an animated film can take a long time, and to make Have a Nice Day took three years. The fear is that something that was relevant three years ago might not be relevant by the time the film is done and ready to go. I like to leave some gaps in the script, and when we’re close to being finished, I can fill them with something that is relevant and modern – in this case it was those events in Britain and the US.”

In terms of taking his cues from other filmmakers, though, Jian cast his net considerably wider than just that corner of the globe. It’s inevitable that people are going to see Tarantino in Have a Nice Day because it genuinely looks as if his fingerprints all over it, but when pushed non-specifically on which directors he took inspiration from when he was making the film, Jian reels off an impressively varied list of names. “In general, I mostly watch action movies. My motivation to create films is personal, but watching colleagues’ films can also be touching. Clint Eastwood, the Coen brothers and Takashi Miike are some of my favourite directors. Satoshi Kon and Mamoru Oshii are also very good.”

In recent times, authorities in China have begun to tighten the reins on the distribution of domestic movies abroad, and Have a Nice Day duly fell foul of the situation last year in fairly farcical circumstances. Having secured a coveted spot as part of the programme at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France – one of, if not the top festival for animated features in the world – the movie’s producers were forced to pull it from the schedule at the eleventh hour after failing to procure the necessary clearance from the Chinese government. 

The appetite for state censorship there is well-documented and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect that Have a Nice Day’s less-than-glowing presentation of certain aspects of Chinese culture had been responsible for it being torpedoed. At the time, producer Yang Cheng insisted that politics had no part to play in the decision, though, and it’s a claim that Jian duly repeats when asked about both the Annecy incident and his hopes for the film now that it’s finally seeing an overseas release.

“I wasn’t aware that the film would cause controversy when it was released; I just wanted to make a good film. I hope that Have a Nice Day will be seen by more audiences. The desires and destinies of the characters in Have a Nice Day are universal, but their different cultural background, coming from China, means that they are expressed in different ways. I am very happy that the film has already been distributed around the world to people from different cultural backgrounds, and I’m interested to see how they will experience this Chinese film. That is what I want to know.”

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Have a Nice Day is released 23 March by MUBI