'Have a Nice Day' Review: Acidic, Astute and Very Animated

Many classic movies can be summed up by a single scene, or even a single shot: Norman Bates behind a shower curtain with a knife; Charles Foster Kane dropping a snow globe down the stairs. In the delicious “Have a Nice Day,” the most significant image might be the bag of 100-yuan banknotes, each bearing the face of Chinese communism’s sainted

Mao Zedong,

and which animator/director

Liu Jian

returns to time and again. That they are stolen banknotes is part of the joke.

The thief is named Xiao Zhang (voice of

Zhu Changlong

), a lowly driver on one of southern China’s multifarious construction sites. That the construction site is mobbed up seems a given; and that the money belongs to a big boss named Uncle Liu (

Yang Siming

)—who, when told about the heist, is busy torturing an old acquaintance—sets the gangster movie in motion. The chase-and-revenge-driven plotline of “Have a Nice Day,” which is a purely ironic title, needless to say, suggests the circumnavigations of a “Pulp Fiction”; the rhythms are out of Jim Jarmusch; Mr. Liu’s predilection as a visual artist to detect the decay and corruption in every seemingly innocent circumstance is something he shares with Robert Crumb.

Not to say any of these sources ought to find Mr. Liu’s references flattering, necessarily. Our “hero,” Zhang, has spontaneously put his life in danger so he can pay for his girlfriend to go back to South Korea and have her botched plastic surgery corrected. Motivations are uniformly banal; characters are resigned to being citizens of a flourishing criminal enterprise. Freedom in China is reduced by one impromptu economist to “farmer’s market freedom,” “supermarket freedom” and “online-shopping freedom.” There’s certainly no great leap forward underlining “Have a Nice Day,” but rather a malignant vein of Westernized consumerism/narcissism.

The way Mao’s visage haunts the proceedings was probably just one of the reasons Chinese authorities forced a withdrawal of the film from the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France last June. The film finally opened theatrically in China two weeks ago, but the impulse to suppress it could hardly have been a surprise: With its casual acknowledgment of rampant profiteering and national avarice, “Have a Nice Day” is pure provocation. The bag of money makes its way from one set of hands to another, no one ever questioning its source or their entitlement to it. Random characters deliver philosophical pronouncements rife with nihilistic cynicism. One couple, in hot pursuit of the cash, dream of a place called Shangri-La, their imaginings transformed by the mischievous Mr. Liu into a karaoke video wherein they assume various heroic poses out of Chinese Communist poster art of the ’60s (workers in headscarves saluting the future, etc.).

There are allusions to the Cultural Revolution, the mass movement of intellectuals to the countryside and, more generally, the cartoonishness of so much Maoist propaganda. With that in mind, Mr. Liu’s faux-naïve style—of a type one would see on Adult Swim, perhaps, albeit without the withering political commentary—is perfect for his story.

It’s a story that doesn’t quite follow the money. The money is a maguffin, as per Hitchcock. It’s about the characters, who include a hit man/butcher named Skinny (Ma Xiaofeng) who goes in search of Zhang, and finds him rather easily—in a nation of 1.4 billion people. Mr. Liu doesn’t quite make China into a small town in “Have a Nice Day.” But he does make it kind of small.

Mr. Anderson is a critic in New York. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation.