Do you ever want to feel artistically superior to all of your friends? Maybe you are tired of your friends talking about how great the latest action film is and want to sound better. Maybe you want to impress your date with obscure film trivia. Maybe you think that knowing a lot about film history and art will somehow validate your meaningless existence and will replace that ever-growing pit in your heart that tells you that you don’t matter and no one cares about you. Well, don’t worry! Because I watch a bunch of art house films and can give you recommendations on what to watch and what to feel superior about! So without any delay, let’s get pretentious!

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I think that this is the first Animated film that I have reviewed for Art House Asshole. It goes to show how few independent and art house animated films there are out there. And I have to say that we aren’t starting particularly strong with this one either. But there really wasn’t anything else out so I guess this is filling the slot for a review this week. So yeah. Here is my review of Have a Nice Day.

Have a Nice Day is a Chinese Animated film from director Jian Liu. Liu previously directed Piercing I back in 2010 with some success. Piercing I won the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and Have a Nice Day was Liu’s return. Now I haven’t seen Piercing I so I can’t say if it’s good or bad, but that also means that I didn’t really have any expectation going into this film. What really intrigued me about this film is the fact that Have a Nice Day was done almost entirely by Liu by himself. The idea of a feature film being done almost entirely by one person is pretty mind-boggling and impressive to me. Unfortunately, as soon as the film started, I thought “Yeah this looks like it was done by one person”.

Have a Nice Day follows a few different people intertwined in a gang. Things get chaotic and there is violence and fun to be had. Except there really isn’t but we will get to that in a moment. The film feels very cheaply animated. The whole thing cost less than 1.5 Million USD, so I give it credit for that. But the animation looks like its done in Flash. It’s extremely minimalistic, which isn’t a good thing. The shots barely move in each scene. You get a close up of one character and the only movement is an extremely small lip movement to show that he is actually talking. The face doesn’t move besides that. And that doesn’t work because there is a disconnect between what the face of the character is saying and what the lines and voice performances are saying. It just doesn’t work and is a huge turn off in the film.

The film is labeled as a dark Comedy. And this is actually the second Chinese Comedy I’ve seen this year. I’ve watched a couple other Chinese Comedies and I’ve come to the conclusion that the sense of humor in China is very different from almost every other country I’ve seen. What I’m getting at here is that this film is as funny as watching paint dry. The film is far more boring and painstakingly dull that either funny or interesting. The film is only 75 minutes long, which is nice. Because if this film went any longer I don’t think I would have been able to stand it.

I don’t have much else to say about this film. In short, the film is boring, lazily animated, and overall pointless. It’s just… ugh. But unfortunately, this was really the only option this week. So here you go. A review that no one will read and even I will forget I wrote in a few months. Maybe that says something about me. Maybe it says something about the film. Either way, everything sucks.