Mind Game

And thus begins my journey into the filmography of one last acclaimed anime director: Masaaki Yuasa. I’m familiar with Yuasa’s work from Devilman Crybaby, The Tatami Galaxy, and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, so I already know he’s the real deal. His stories are among the most visually imaginative, densely layered, and effortlessly rewarding anime on the market, bursting with his uniquely sloppy animation style and a visceral understanding of what makes people tick in their best and worst moments alike. That said, he’s also responsible for Japan Sinks, which I’ve admittedly softened on a bit over the past year but was still a catastrophic misfire on pretty much every front. So he’s clearly not an unimpeachable talent. He can make mistakes and put out bad results, same as everyone. So it’s a damn good thing I was already familiar with his work before checking out Mind Game, his debut film from all the way back in 2004. Because if this had been my introduction to Yuasa, I would have been tempted to steer clear of everything else he’s ever done.

Mind Game is a hard movie to summarize, because it’s one of those surreal art-house affairs where imagery and Big Ideas take precedence over basic coherency. It jumps between at least three different genres and tones, haphazardly pulling all sorts of disconnected tropes out of its ass and discarding them the moment it’s finished with them. Things start off like a romantic drama; wimpy college kid Kishi reconnects with his childhood crush Myon who’s getting married to a hot stud, and we spend like ten minutes just watching them talk and hash out their life stories in the bar run by Myon’s older sister. Then a couple Yakuza toughies break down the door for some reason I’m still not entirely sure of; I think Myon’s father cheated them out of world cup tickets or something? Anyway, one of the yaks tries to rape Myon but gets distracted and kills Kishi instead, at which point Kishi goes to the afterlife meets God- yes, actually God- represented by a series of rapidly changing characters from people to fish. God tells him his time is up, but Kishi doesn’t want to die such a pathetic death, so he literally escapes the afterlife and comes back to life right before he dies, at which point he steals the attacker’s gun with his buttcheeks and uses it to kill him instead, resolving to live a full, passionate life from now on. And that’s the last we see of God for the entire movie; we never visit him or the afterlife ever again, and it’s barely even brought up.

Anyway, after... that happens, Kishi pulls Myon and her sister into the yakuzas’ car and makes a getaway, at which point Mind Game becomes a high-octane Fast and Furious car chase with the yakuza’s partners trying to run them off the road. All the laws of physics and reality are broken as they make their mad escape, dodging other cars and enemies firing guns, until they’re run off a bridge and plunge toward the dark water below... only to be swallowed by a gigantic whale that shows up out of nowhere, drowning the yazuka in the process who also never show up and are barely mentioned ever again.

This is just the first forty minutes of the movie.

Mercifully, once our cast of characters actually finds themselves in the whale’s stomach, we stay in that location for the entire rest of the film. Kishi, Myon, and her sister meet a crazy old man who was also swallowed by the whale long ago and has build a little wooden village for himself to live in. From here on, Mind Game essentially becomes a trippy slice-of-life scenario following the characters living in the whale’s belly, the stress it puts on their emotional state, and how they all change and grow as a result of it, punctuated with sequences of LCD-induced lunacy as the characters let their emotions run hog-wild and we lose all sense of grounding in anything even resembling reality. Sadly, the jarring randomness of the film doesn’t vanish now that we’re stuck in a single location; every scene feels disconnected from the one that came before, every flight of fancy feels like a complete non-sequitor, and there’s basically nothing in the way of plot or character arcs until it’s suddenly revealed that the whale is dying and everyone decides they’d better try escaping despite its seeming impossibility. And then everything climaxes with, I shit you not, at least five straight minutes of the characters wordlessly running up a cascading waterfall as they try to escape the whale, with no variation and basically nothing going on but them running on vertical water and gradually losing their clothes in the process.

I don’t normally describe the entire plot of a movie or show in my reviews, but I need to give you the sense of how fucking nonsensical Mind Game is to watch. The closest thing it gets to a point is in some abstract notion of living your life to its fullest, which I guess is what all this insanity is supposed to represent, but it’s all so thoughtlessly thrown together that it comes off as little more than white noise. There are so many weird, bizarre, utterly unique images throughout this movie, and I remember basically none of them. I couldn’t begin to tell you why anything in this movie is the way it is. Why does it sometimes shift art styles so the characters are portrayed as photos of real-life people animated like stop motion? Why have the afterlife section at all if it’s never gonna come up again? Why is there a montage of moments in our characters’ pasts at the beginning and end of the movie? Is the crazy old man supposed to be Kishi’s father? Why does Myon have sex with Kishi after he tells her a story of tiny space explorers who live on her cells like they’re planets until she literally shits them out? Yes, go back, read that sentence again, that is an actual thing that happens in this movie. Also, we randomly get flashes of backstory for Myon right in the buildup to the big escape and she tells her that she’s sorry for always dumping the burden on her, which feels like it’s supposed to be the climax to a character arc, but I’m honestly not sure if they had a single conversation prior to that point, save for a brief moment in the bath that’s interrupted by Kishi and the old man perving on them, because of course it fucking is. Oh, and you better believe that Myon’s huge tits are a popular subject of both the characters’ conversations and the camera’s lens, even shortly after she’s almost raped. Because it’s deeeeeep, man, you just don’t get it, maaaaaaan!

Yeah, no, this movie sucks. It’s an incomprehensible clusterfuck of meaningless imagery mistaking confusing and obtuseness for profound insight and artistic brilliance. The only reason I’m not rating it lower is that it’s not offensive enough to really piss me off. It’s just baffling and annoying and a waste of time that no one should bother watching. Yuasa would go on to make actually good anime after this, with stories worth telling and visuals that supported them, so I won’t hold it against him. If nothing else, the animation is still legitimately impressive. But even as a debut project, this is too stupid to enjoy. Hopefully his future films will give me more to gush over, yeah?