Mind Game

An animated film set in Japan. Nishi wants to draw comics. He cannot manage it, cannot show them to anyone, and his life has stopped somewhere. He meets Myon, the girl he loved as a child. She is being threatened by a yakuza and her father owes money. The men come to the bar. Nishi does nothing and is killed. Then he passes to the other side. There is a being there. It changes shape constantly and shows Nishi a door: there is nothing after this. Nishi runs. He runs back, returns to his own death, and behaves differently this time. From there the film becomes a chase. A car, a bridge, a river and a whale. Three of them end up inside the whale. Nishi, Myon and her sister, and an old man living there. Years pass. A life is built inside the whale and the film goes completely calm in that section. What the narrative is interested in is not death but a second attempt: its whole idea is a person going back into his own life and not being afraid this time. The form is undefined. The narrative stays in no style; hand drawing, computer, photographs, real faces, pencil scribble and entirely abstract passages come one after another. Photographs of real actors are laid over some characters' faces, and that choice is deliberately unsettling. The source is Robin Nishi's comic. This is Masaaki Yuasa's first feature and the visual language of all his later work is established here. It was barely seen on release and became a cult item over the years. Koji Imada, Sayaka Maeda and Takashi Fujii are among the voices. Masaaki Yuasa wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes experimental animation and films that recognise no limit of form. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a straight narrative; the film abandons its rules in the first twenty minutes and some sections are plainly crude.