Mind Game + Happy Machine

Quiz time: what happens when you let Masaaki Yuasa roam freely on a film adaptation of Robin Nishi’s mangaMind 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. Mind Game is preceded by a screening of Yuasa's short film Happy Machine. The circle of life, Masaaki Yuasa's version. An infant lives in a bright colourful nursery that caters to his every whim, only for it to suddenly break down. He then goes on a surreal odyssey of growth. As fast-paced and imaginative as anything the director does, Happy Machine offers us a fascinating view on growing up, albeit in his own intriguing visual style. This was Yuasa's first short film after 2004's Mind Game and was made as part of Studio 4°C's anthology film Genius Party.