Well, I couldn’t find the Mind Game review I wrote for Anime England back in 2006 so here’s something new I cooked up.
A yakuza’s stolen World Cup tickets sets off a strange series of events of wannabe comic writer Nishi. First he runs into his childhood crush Myon, then he dies and meets God, before a car chase ends with Nishi, Myon and her sister Yan being swallowed by a whale.
Inside the whale they meet an old man, and the four of them begin to develop their true selves rather than the people life has ground them down into. However they come to realise that such developments are worthless if they can’t share them with the world at large. So they have to attempt the seemingly impossible task of escaping the very large whale in which they are trapped.
Stylistically, Masaaki Yuasa’s feature film often feels like an anthology united by a continuing narrative. This is both in the varying animation techniques used through the duration and in the moods of the individual scenes. I mentioned John K’s What is a Cartoon article in the FLCL post, and while I’m certain the character designs and some techniques would be anathema for him, Mind Game at various points does fulfil all 5 points, including the ultimate in butt stabs.
That’s the great thing about Yuasa, his experience on Shin-chan and Maruko-Chan has left him with a sensibility that knows that one thing cartoons do really well is physical comedy, because they can go beyond what the human body can easily do in real life. Actually that’s probably a little unfair on other Japanese animators, I’m sure they know it too, they’re often prevented from taking advantage by what they’re stuck working on.
Until I rewatched Mind Game today, I was going with FLCL as being my favourite Japanese animation of the last 10 years, but I’m finding that every time I watch Mind Game it gets better, whereas watching FLCL is just a confirmation of its excellence. If you’ve not had the chance to see the film (luckily I caught it on the big screen at the NFT in 2006), I recommend picking up either the Australian or Japanese release (it has English subtitles). Criminally it’s not had a release in the US or UK yet, despite getting strong reviews when it made their festival circuits.
It’s definitely worth the investment of your time and money.