20th Anniversary
Buckle in and prepare to surrender yourself to an exhilarating and wildly entertaining ride. Masaaki Yuasa's cult classic Mind Game is an explosion of unconstrained expression—gloriously colorful images ricochet in rapid fire associations, like Masaaki Yuasa’s brain splattered onto the screen in all its goopy glory.
Loser Nishi, too wimpy to try to save his childhood sweetheart from gangsters, is shot in the butt by a soccer-playing psychopath, projecting Nishi into the afterlife. In this limbo, God—shown as a series of rapidly changing characters—tells him to walk toward the light. But Nishi runs like hell in the other direction and returns to Earth a changed man, driven to live each moment to the fullest.
Mind Game indulges in the goofiness and malleability of animated filmmaking, building up a funhouse of kaleidoscopic visual tricks. This is a movie that blends digital animation with rotoscoping, watercolors, sketches, and CGI as effortlessly as it navigates the genres it bounces through.
"Put simply, Mind Game is a mind-blowing experience." —Phil Hall, Film Threat
This film screens as part of our Ani-May series, featuring Ghost in the Shell, Mind Game, Paprika, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, May 24 to 30.