All scrunched together into a dense marathon of optical-cranial overload, this mental puzzle-box arrives three decades too late for what would have been an inevitable midnight movie run, but undoubtedly there are American otakus popping this one into multi-region DVD players right now amid the glorbeling of bong hits.
Mind Game(マインド・ゲーム )
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Japan · 2004
1h 43m
Director Masaaki Yuasa
Starring Koji Imada, Sayaka Maeda, Takashi Fujii, Seiko Takuma
Genre Adventure, Animation, Mystery
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The film follows Nishi, a loser who has a crush on his childhood sweetheart. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, the film follows Nishi as he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place. A mind-blowing experiment that combines anime aesthetics with Western animation styles.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
A sometimes enthralling, sometimes exhausting tour de force.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
A virtuoso experiment in animation that combines traditional anime aesthetics style with a variety of Western animation styles.
Put simply, Mind Game is a mind-blowing experience.
Brain-teasing, wildly unpredictable animated feature.
The exhilarating Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy Mind Game plays out like a hallucinogen-fueled shaggy-dog joke that only ends after twenty-year-old horndog Nishi (Kôji Imada) discovers that the world does not revolve around him.
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