Have a Nice Day

Liu Jian chose not to specify the Chinese city in which his second animated feature is set, which seems to suggest that the story could feasibly take place in any of his homeland’s urban areas. The film’s central theme of the blind worship of money, though, is a universal enough one that you suspect a Western remake would not run aground in the face of difficulty in translating cultural differences. Have a Nice Day quite literally follows the money – specifically, a stolen bag containing one million renminbi ($150,000 in US currency), which effectively serves as the film’s protagonist as it moves through the criminal underworld from one craven pair of hands to the next. 

Only the in-over-his-head mob driver Xiao Zhang appears to have relatively good intentions for the cash – he wants to use it to correct his girlfriend’s botched plastic surgery – but quickly learns that there is little room for sentiment or virtue in an environment where greed and materialism reign, particularly as an array of crooks move the bag between each other by snatching it in increasingly brutal ways; the comparisons that have been drawn with Tarantino are unsurprising.

The gangster narrative is a well-worn one and Jian, superficially at least, appears to do it by-the-numbers, albeit with a consistent vein of deliciously dark humour. The animation style, meanwhile, involves a peculiar juxtaposition between minimally-drawn characters and lush landscapes. It’s the film’s relentlessly bleak commentary on increasing movement towards individualism and commercialism in modern China, then, that sets it apart – especially given the parallels that the director draws with the Western world, complete with sharp, direct references to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Beneath the rough-and-tumble of what appears to be a crime caper is a well of cynicism that leaves its mark on the viewer, painting as it does a dark picture of where the whole world seems to be headed, not just China. [Joe Goggins]