Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.
It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.
There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.
But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’
But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.
What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.
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