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Mind Game Movie Review

Mind Game is a 2004 experimental anime film directed by Masaaki Yuasa. It is an authentic, but barely engaging movie.

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“Fear takes the shape we’re willing to give it“

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After a deadly encounter with two yakuza, a loser with a crush on his childhood girlfriend goes to heaven and back, embarking on a psychedelic self-discovery experience with her and his friends. This is one of those ‘Fantasia’-inspired movies that have almost no plot, but are mostly an excuse for visual splendor and artistry, where it succeeds, but only to a certain degree.

First and foremost, Mind Game has a storyline actually, but it’s one that I personally found uninteresting. The crime and drama elements clashed super hard against the more fantastical imagery, and that combination was executed in a very uneasy, far from deft manner. The characterization is also far from great as I did not care about any of these people and I even found most of them unlikable.

As for this animation, it’s a mixed bag. I know that many respect it, but I personally found some of the segments here quite problematic. The best parts of the movie were clearly the amazing backgrounds throughout with a lot of detail and hand-drawn manga-inspired artistry on display. I also loved the afterworld scenes that were pleasantly reminiscent of Pixar’s ‘Soul’.

Whenever the movie was more detailed and old-fashioned in approach, I loved it. But everything else I found unappealing, especially some more modern facial animal techniques that clashed against the otherwise more traditional techniques in a far from smooth manner. Some faces had overly big noses and some were quite grotesque, which maybe was intentional, but to me it simply wasn’t. Again, the tone is a major issue here as it doesn’t ever know whether it’s a crime drama or a fantasy or a straight-up horror movie.

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Mind Game is at its best in those fantastical sequences, which are uniformly imaginative and riveting. But all of the other segments felt dull and half-baked in comparison. The crime parts were more silly than needed and more R-rated intentionally than it was earned. The movie did mix different techniques and styles in one package, which was authentic and inspirational, but the execution of that mixture wasn’t the greatest unfortunately.

Mind Game is an authentic experiment where Masaaki Yuasa mixed many different styles and animation techniques in one singular package. The problem is that the animation is widely uneven. Whereas the background work and the world building were accomplished, the facial animation was unappealingly grotesque. The movie’s mixing of different genres was uneasy while the plot and characterization were also quite weak. It’s an artistic movie for sure, but one that is difficult to be riveted by.

My Rating – 3