Have A Nice Day is a 2018 Chinese animated film about a city in southern China and a bag containing a million yuan that draw several people from diverse backgrounds with different personal motives into a bloody conflict.
Undoubtedly, the first thing to notice about writer/director Jian Liu‘s latest masterpiece is the way it looks, a mix of incredibly detailed, authentic-looking backgrounds with heavily stylized characters, giving the film an oddly disjointed feel. This is a dark, crime story reliant on its extraordinary visual flares to elevate it from the trappings of the genre, making this a powerfully unsettling yet undeniably thrilling experience.
On a beat set by pounding construction equipment rezoning a demolished end of a grim neighborhood, a black car works its way through the rundown streets of the poor and homeless, stopping in an isolated corner where driver Xiao Zhang (Zhu Changlong) suddenly pulls a knife on his passenger, stealing a big bag of money he is supposed to be delivering. It belongs to mob boss Uncle Liu (Yang Siming), and he absolutely wants it back. To do so, Liu puts the nasty Skinny (Ma Xiaofeng), a brutal hitman, on the case, though that’s only part of the problem for Zhang, as others learn the money is out there, and all he wants to do is help his girlfriend Yan Zi go to South Korea to repair her botched plastic surgery.
Have A Nice Day is of course ironic, the dreary, fallen away city in the south of China nearly devoid of people, mostly all the characters we meet all connected in some way to the missing money. The dilapidated state of the film’s imagined world is a far cry from bustle and technologically-driven metropolises on the coast, where much of our impression of the country stems. It’s home to a seedy underbelly of destitution and crime, like a Chinese version of a lawless American old west. Liu paints the city in cracked grey buildings and frayed posters, littered empty avenues and lonely cafes, all of which make a striking visual setting for these desperate people to squirm about.
Much is symbolic, the lost money itself the singular hope for many as a way out of their hell. All talk of bettering themselves, to find some hope in escape. Lui portrays this in vapid conversations and curious cutaways to imagined stylized dreams of what money could offer. Often he indulges in the artistry of his story – a striking moment of a camera panning along a flat blanket of ocean water runs for a full two minutes, leaving the viewer in a sort of trance like meditative state on the hopelessness of some of these people while further journeying us down the spiral they all seem unable to be free of. Needless to say, there is great violence and death (much of it off screen), and Lui keeps you constantly unsure of any stability.
Have A Nice Day is purposefully slow-paced, but at about 70 minutes, packs plenty in delivering great impact. Even as the characters are drawn with very little to give them depth, a choice made to accentuate the bleakness of their existence, they express far beyond their words, stuck in a deeply fascinating microcosm that moves like no other film in this genre. All around them are walls, stretched across nearly every frame they travel along. This is the world they live in, are trapped by, and struggle to claw their way out of or on top of. Have A Nice Day is a film you won’t soon forget.