Director: Masaaki Yuasa
Writer: Robin Nishi
Genre: Animation / Adventure / Comedy
Mind Game recounts the story of Nishi, a wienerish manga artist who’s too shy to confess his love for his childhood friend Myon. After a chance meeting, they go to the yakitori restaurant that Myon runs with her sister Yan and her pathetic, egocentric father, who is wanted by the yakuzos. The gangsters show up, and in a weird twist of events Nishi is murdered in one of the most degrading manners conceivable. After a brief stint in the afterlife, Nishi makes a break for it back to earth with a new lease on life and the balls to match. He rescues everyone and skips off with Myon and Yan in the gangsters’ car, but the yakuzos are soon on his tail. The chase goes well for Nishi and crew until they ramp off a bridge and are swallowed by a huge whale. There they make friends with a fellow Jonah and settle in for a long, fascinating stay.
This movie is brilliant for more reasons than I can even begin to describe. Masaaki employs a dazzling array of anime styles and techniques, tampering joyfully and explosively with everything his medium has to offer. To watch this film is to examine life through more colorful lenses than I almost thought possible to the imagination. Masaaki dances between perspectives, flits along mad tangential flights of fancy, peeks incessantly at bright possible-worlds, back-flips through reminiscences, makes unthinkable connections, and somehow, incredibly, still leaves much to the imagination.
Mind Game couldn’t be more different from the slick giant robots, mega-sized guns, and short-skirted schoolgirls that have come to be associated with Japanese anime in the minds of Westerners. Fast and funny, smutty and sexy, bizarre and hypnotic. It’s a movie that exists to remind us that life is a miracle. And so is Mind Game.
