Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

Movie Overview

Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome / 夜は短し歩けよ乙女) is an anime movie that’s set within the same universe as the series The Tatami Galaxy, yet isn’t a sequel. Also, I’m not sure why the English title of this movie doesn’t begin with “The,” but we’re just going to ignore that.

Anyway, the movie is told from the perspectives of two main characters. First and foremost, we have the female lead who’s the true protagonist of the movie. She doesn’t have a name, but she’s referred to by the male lead as “the Raven-Haired Maiden.” I’ll be referring to her as “the girl” from now on.

The second main character is the male lead, who also doesn’t have a real name. The girl refers to him as “Senpai,” so that’s what I’ll continue to refer to him as. While the girl and Senpai look very similar to Akashi and the unnamed male lead from The Tatami Galaxy, it should be noted that they are different.

I bring this up because there are quite a few characters who appear in both that series and this movie. Specifically, if you’ve seen that series, then you’ll probably be familiar with Higuchi, Ryouko, Johnny, Jougasaki, Kaori, and Ozu (who goes by a different name this time around).

As for what the movie is about, that’s hard to say. It’s about one, severely alcoholic girl’s night out on the town. She out-drinks everyone she meets, performs in a flash musical, rescues used books from a nefarious collector, survives a pandemic, and more. And yet, in the end, I’m still not entirely sure what it was about.

Just Some Things I Liked

While I enjoyed the movie overall, I’d like to use this section of the review to go over some of the things I liked most about it. To start, I really liked the fact that watching the movie, you actually get the sense that there’s way too much happening for it to take place in one night.

The only scene of the movie that doesn’t happen within a single, eight or so hour span is the final scene at the end. Everything else occurs in the span of a single night, which is a fairly important point. The idea here is that both of the main characters gained years’ worth of experiences within a single night.

There were actually multiple times throughout the movie when I questioned whether or not all of these events were happening back to back. And then, every time I found myself wondering this, I remembered that that’s the point of the whole movie. So, the fact that this happened multiple times shows how well the movie achieved that goal.

Another thing I enjoyed was the music during the musical theater sections of the movie. I noticed that multiple songs were effectively rip-offs of Queen songs. Maybe all of the songs were (I don’t know because I don’t know that much Queen), but I believe I noticed three different cases of this.

I don’t have anything else to say about that. I just enjoyed that there were references in the movie that I was able to catch.

And, the third and final thing I want to mention that I liked a lot was one scene that involved watches. There were some old men whose watches were running through years, the girl’s senpai (Higuchi and Ryouko) had watches that ran through weeks, and then the girl’s watch ran normally.

I thought this was a cool way to illustrate how the passage of time appears to be different for people depending on their age. To the girl, the night was extremely long, but to those who have been alive for longer, a single night is extremely short.

Comparison to The Tatami Galaxy

I think it would be odd for me to not set aside a portion of this review to compare this movie to The Tatami Galaxy. And the first thing I have to say regarding these two anime is that I liked how Night Is Short, Walk on Girl didn’t have dialogue that was quite as fast as the dialogue in The Tatami Galaxy.

There’s nothing inherently bad with the dialogue speed in that series, but I appreciated not needing to pause or go back just so that I could read the subtitles. But, I think that might be the only thing I liked about this movie more than that series.

In a lot of ways, this movie felt like it was trying to be The Tatami Galaxy rather than being its own thing. Obviously, the two are connected, so there’s going to be some overlap, but I didn’t get the feeling that this movie had much of its own identity. For example, as I already mentioned, even the main characters look (and often act) nearly identical.

The other way that I think this movie falls short of that series is due to the protagonist. The girl simply isn’t as interesting as the male lead of The Tatami Galaxy. That’s partially because she only has a single movie’s worth of development while he has a whole series, but I stand by that statement nonetheless.

It’s not her fault that she doesn’t get as much development, but I do think that’s a drawback of the movie. One of my favorite parts of the series was the protagonist’s spiral down into his own mind. The girl in this movie didn’t really have anything like that.

For her, it was effectively a very event-packed, yet fairly normal, coming of age story. Through her travels over the course of this night, she learned a lot about herself — mostly in the form of reaffirming that she can out-drink anyone — but she didn’t exactly have a defining moment in which she developed.

Conclusion

Overall, I think Night Is Short, Walk on Girl is a 7/10. It’s a good movie and I enjoyed it, but I don’t feel like it’s anywhere near The Tatami Galaxy. I feel like I tend to rate movies higher than series, but in this situation, that’s not the case.

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