Mind Game: Colors, Breasts And A Dead God

I was trying to get high on cocoa, and when that didn’t work, I figured I’d assault my brain another way. Pulled up Mind Game around midnight.

The film doesn’t ease you in. Some petty criminal falls for a girl with massive breasts, gets shot in the ass during a robbery, then a god appears—physically unstable, operating through screens and mirrors—offering a second chance. He takes it, runs off with a failed swimmer and her butchy sister, dodging gangsters and cartoon violence and ugly Frenchmen. Meanwhile the film keeps cutting to a space crew stranded on an alien ship, eating the creature’s waste to survive, their only exit a Japanese woman’s vagina. Everything bottoms out in a whale’s belly, an old man, a meaning nobody asked for.

Masaaki Yuasa directed this, and Studio 4°C (the ones behind Batman Gotham Knight and the Animatrix sequences) throws everything at you at once. Scene cuts refuse warning. Three animation styles colliding every few minutes. Colors that shouldn’t coexist somehow work. It’s designed to scramble your brain, and I let it. Ended up on the floor in something between fetal position and genuine awe, finally understanding what I’d been chasing that whole night.

The sensible take is that this isn’t for everyone—definitely not sober—but there’s a real difference between trying to look weird and being genuinely unhinged. Once you’ve burned through your Alices and Rocky Horrors and everything else performing strangeness without committing to it, you run into something like this: visually relentless, refusing to apologize, refusing to explain itself. Nishi never gets what he wants. The god never makes sense. You spend two hours watching the world collapse into itself, and somehow that’s the best thing that’s happened to you in weeks.