Mind Game (2004)

Quiz time: what happens when you let Masaaki Yuasa roam freely on a film adaptation of Robin Nishi’s manga Mind Game? Answer: you get just about the most extraordinary piece of anime history. Yuasa’s film is a wacky, kaleidoscopic, completely off-the-wall anime that pushes boundaries beyond anywhere we could have imagined. There’s even a scene where the main character meets God, who – in true Yuasa fashion – morphs into various bizarre life forms, most notably a goldfish smoking a cigarette. On paper, none of it should work. But with Yuasa at the helm, impossibilities become miracles, and chaos transforms into art.

At the heart of this anarchic fever dream lies Nishi, a young man hopelessly in love with his childhood sweetheart, Myon. Now adults, Nishi dreams of marrying her and becoming a manga artist, but Myon has already accepted a proposal from someone else. However, a fateful encounter with a couple of yakuza at Myon’s family dinner upends their lives, plunging them head-first into a wild adventure. With a newly acquired look on life, he, Myon, and her sister escape the yakuza into a most unlikely location where they meet an old man…

Words can hardly capture the expressiveness of Yuasa’s feature debut. It’s a frenetic, delirious, and visually explosive ride that feels like it could have been conjured in a hallucinatory dream. Employing an eclectic mix of techniques – rotoscoping, pencil sketches, watercolours, CGI, and even papercraft –Mind Game is a testament to animation’s limitless potential. And then there’s that jaw-dropping climax, where Nishi literally runs on molecules of air. This, dear animation fans, isn’t just anime. It’s art. 

Melkweg often hosts different types of programmes at the same time, such as concerts, club nights and films. Please note that there may occasionally be some noise pollution from other programmes during the screening.