Mind Games
In the animated feature film Mind Game, a variety of art styles are employed. Because Japan has been producing psychedelic music for many years now, this may be considered the world’s first truly Japanese psychedelic animated movie. How the notoriously anti-drug country has become such a hotbed for psychedelic art might seem strange to those familiar with Western notions of psychedelia; however, unlike its Western counterpart, Japan’s version does not rely on drugs: Art alone is believed capable of inducing experiences more profound than any caused by substances.
Therefore, even if Mind Game’s message could be said to be “you can do anything if you try,” it never spells that out directly. Rather than doing so explicitly, what the movie does is present an exhilaratingly preposterous and totally fantastic representation of willpower in action or at least as much of this as animation allows which makes one believe without doubt in this message mentioned above.
To say that watching Mind Game can change lives is an understatement; it will hardly find a wide audience but should at least become one such cult classic masterpiece that appears about once per decade.
Attempting to outline the story of Mind Game would be futile; it would spoil everything and serve no purpose. However, I can say that most scenes take place inside a whale’s stomach (literally).
The movie starts off like any other film might; it seems normal and slow at first before becoming increasingly odd as time goes on. There are some unconventional choices made artistically namely through odd art design coupled with sparsely used live-action photography inserted into the animation but these are only signs pointing toward what lies ahead creatively speaking.
As minutes pass by during its runtime, this flick grows stronger and stronger while adding in more originality every second; freeze framing anywhere throughout could reveal single frames reminiscent of Aaron Springer’s Sponge bob or Glen Keane’s Tarzan or Bill Plympton or modern Japanese iconic character design or a drawing by a seven-year-old maybe all of those within the same couple seconds. Conversely, some drawings might look poorly drawn or bad as pictures alone but become beautiful when animated.
Mind Game gets episodic in its second half becomes a series of loosely related experiments in animation styles that punctuate the main narrative with blasts of fun. All leading up to the giant climax: ten minutes of pure energy that could become the highlight of anime history. Masaaki Yuasa made Mind Game as his first feature, though he directed an episode of a series called Nanchatte Vampiyan (Vampiyan Kids) before this film.
That’s not to say he’s new at this. He’s been working as an animation director since the early 90s and has had plenty of time to think about what makes good animation. It seems like Yuasa comes from that sect of Japanese animators who believe movement is more important than individual drawings being neat or exact. He loves funny camera angles and huge 3D camera moves in drawn animation where you’re less concerned with keeping perspective correct and more concerned with making people dizzy.
He knows how expressive it can be when characters are deformed and taken off-model, not just in the usual Japanese way where things get kind of sloppy and loose, but in ways that genuinely caricature action and emotion differently than anything North American animators would ever do. He obviously watched a lot of old Hollywood cartoons when he was a kid, and I bet he could do some really great Tex Avery-style stuff if he felt like it.
Pretty much every bit of animation I’ve seen that credited him (even if only as key animator) carries with it some hint of his unusual personal sensibility, often identifiable as that warm, innocent Japanese psychedelia which is not at all like Western psychedelia except for how colorful both kinds usually are.
Once you’ve seen some other things he’s done, like Cat Soup or Noiseman Sound Insect or the Nanchatte Vampiyan pilot or a few episodes Crayon Shin-chan or whatever else is out there, you realize that Mind Game is no fluke. He’s just one of those people who won’t run out of ideas, and whose execution keeps getting better with each new attempt.
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