Review: I'll be thinking about Long Long Night for a long long time

To be alive, to choose to live, is to open yourself to pain and loss. Connecting with others means that those connections will eventually, inevitably be severed. The people who love us into being who we are, who we will become, will fade away, move, die. If we're lucky, we live long enough to become those cornerstone relationships for others. We might become a mentor, a friend, a lover, a parent. And then we will die, but our impact will linger in those who follow in our footsteps, carry our memory, repeat our words.

Long Long Night, the debut feature of writer-director Youm Kyu-Bock, is permeated with loss. Which means it's also permeated with love. Norden is the last remaining white boulder rhino on earth. His life is marked by loss, again and again. He falls in love, makes friends, becomes a parent (in a couple different ways). Almost every connection he makes ends in tragedy. But he carries on, in part because he hopes to make more connections, but more so because he feels a responsibility to the various other characters he walks alongside. Whether it's the elephants who raised him as one of his own, the other rhinos he meets, or his unlikeliest friend of all: a zoo-born penguin who wants to swim in the ocean.

Going into this movie, I expected to experience a world of pain. And god, does it deliver on that front. There are so many images and lines from this movie that I'll carry with me, that I'll never be able to shake. The film's framing and narration set the stage for what to expect immediately. We meet Norden when he is very old, sickly, lying in a field. A team of humans stop by to treat him, check on him, give him some medicine. The (initially) unnamed narrator tells us how sad it is that no one knows about Norden's beginning, his early life, because he has so many stories. But now he is old and sick and he's going to die soon, and there's no one left for him to tell his stories to.

Thankfully, we get to hear his story.

In some ways, the structure of Long Long Night feels like it's a spiritual successor to Au Hasard Balthazar and EO, two notable films that follow the plights of donkeys, their episodic lives revealing various truths about the state of humanity. Long Long Night feels similar in that Norden's story breaks up pretty neatly into chapters, each one featuring different supporting characters. But while the film does have something to say about humanity, it's more interested in exploring the humanity of its animal characters. And in this case, the animals can talk.

It might take viewers a little time to settle into Long Long Night, because the visual approach and the storytelling sensibility sometimes feel at odds with each other, or maybe just an odd match. When the film started, I found the animation a bit off-putting. It's going for a very photo-realistic look, and a lot of the film looks incredible. The environments are especially impressive, and there were a couple shots where I even wondered if it was live-action footage spliced in for shits and giggles. The characters also look quite real, with a tad of cartoon-iness added to let them be more expressive. The humans tend to look the most out of place -- something about the way they move pops out and hits the eye strangely, like they're NPCs in a video game or something. At times, the lighting and texture feel just a bit off. But largely, this is a nice-looking movie.

But, the photo-realism does feel a bit strange when paired with some of the film's funnier moments. And yes, despite this being an extremely sad movie, it also has a wonderful sense of humor. There are some fart jokes, some kooky supporting characters, and even gay penguins. It's an interesting match between form and content, and one that I certainly got used to and ended up really enjoying. But it is a little weird.

That said, there is something to such realistic-looking animation helping to really ground the story. The stakes feel so high, the world feels so real. It really helps the emotional impact to feel so exactly, precisely delivered. 

I don't want to get into too much detail about how Norden's journey plays out, because it's a surprising (and even shocking) adventure. The film is most concerned with the lengths we go to to protect our own, and what it looks like to hold onto anger in the midst of loss. There's a special emphasis on parent-child relationships, and what it means to raise a child in a violent and cruel world. Norden feels so much anger toward humans, and wants to seek revenge, but as he continues his journey, he realizes that not all humans are evil, just as not all animals are. There's good and bad to be found everywhere, and it's important to do our part to tip the balance toward good. For him, a big part of that is helping the little penguin make it to the ocean, to finally take a swim in that vast expanse.

In the movie, the phrase "long long night" is brought up over and over again. It refers to the nights where sleep is all but impossible, because nightmares and bad memories are waiting if you close your eyes. So you stay up, restless, waiting for the sun to rise so you can continue on and leave those chilling thoughts in the darkness. What a gift it is to be able to rest easily, to not be plagued by such visions.

I know I'll be thinking about Long Long Night for a long, long time. And despite the many horrors contained within, I won't be haunted by those so much as I'll be basking in the beautiful moments, especially toward the film's end. A couple lines of narration in particular will stick with me, and I'll leave them with you:

The ocean was all too big, but we were so small.

The ocean was so beautiful, but we were a mess.

That we were.