Mind Game

Do you know that feeling that you get when you are watching a director’s debut film and you just feel exhausted and think that half of the techniques used were unnecessary and a way for the director to show off?

Well, that’s mind game for you.

To be fair, Yuasa had already occupied the chair of “Director” before as episode director for “Rakugo Kan” and director for short films like "Slime Adventures: Yay, the Sea!” among other important creative roles.

But Mind Game was his directorial debut for a feature-length film, and it fucking shows.

The movie is constantly visually stimulating, using eye-catching techniques to emphasize every single fucking action that the characters do or events that happen on screen, to the point in which many scenes would have benefited from a more conventional directing approach.

Great directors are able to emphasize and exaggerate actions or moments for the scenes that need it and present other more intimate scenes with subtlety, atmosphere, and quietness. This movie only does the first thing, and the result is a visually exhaustive work in which half of the time I was asking myself: Was this really necessary?

There are a lot of scenes in this film that are technically and creatively really impressive but come out of absolutely nowhere, mean nothing, and are such a waste of time to the point that despite the crazy shit happening on screen, it feels dragged out and boring, like they were only there for Yuasa to show off.

Not only that, but there are some techniques that just look awful or feel cheap. Using real-life photographs for faces while the rest of the shot is animated sounds like a good concept, but in execution, it ends up looking horrible. There is also a weird sequence in which a girl paints herself with paint several times and fucking jumps into a windmill or something weird like that, and they just straight up repeat the same animation with different coloring like 10 times, which of course makes the scene feel boring and repetitive.

I could go on, but the thing is that the whole movie, both story- and presentation-wise, just feels like a first-time director trying his best to impress you with what technically impressive feats he can achieve without really understanding restraint, meaning, pacing, or subtlety.

The final result is a visually interesting mess that feels like a drag, exhaustive, wasted time, and even pretentious.

I give it an okay score because it's still visually interesting at times and because it has the best sex scene ever presented in any audiovisual medium lmao.

Anyways, “Night is short, walk on girl” is still king among the Yuasa works that I have watched until now.

Bye bye.

Thanks for reading.