Part of Midnight Movies
Buckle in and prepare to surrender yourself to an exhilarating and wildly entertaining ride. Cult classic MIND GAME is an explosion of unconstrained expression — gloriously colorful mages ricochet in rapid fire associations, like Masaaki Yuasa’s brain splattered onto the screen in all its goopy glory.
Audiences will begin to grasp what they are in for early on as 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.
“For anime aficionados, the film…is itself a vision of paradise. Its plot is tangled and meandering, as is often the case with feature-length anime, but its visual textures and rhythms are fresh and strange.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times
“Brain-teasing, wildly unpredictable animated feature…. [A] freewheeling juggernaut of a head-trip.” —Ronnie Scheib, Variety