"Mind Game"- Masaaki Yuasa, 2004

I've spent a long time searching for a director who really inspired me to write about film again. My usual favorites (Bresson, Tati, Hitchcock, et al.) have been covered countless thousands of times by students of the medium far more proficient and talented than myself. It's one thing to write a mediocre piece about an artist; it's an entirely more awful thing to write a mediocre piece about an artist that has already had millions of mediocre pieces written about them. Next, I thought about writing about the filmmakers I was discovering for the first time. Ideas raced through my head for things I could write about the joy of witnessing Tarkovsky's masterpiece "Stalker" for the first time. I figured that while it was uninteresting to write badly about something I'd seen a million times, it might be slightly compelling to write badly about something I'd finally just gotten to. The high school freshman who finally pops "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" into Spotify for the first time and raves about it to his friends may not have the most useful insight, but at least he's excited, and excitement counts for something.

I tried to write about Tarkovsky, but found that even my enthusiasm couldn't carry me through the task. While "Stalker" is just a masterpiece all-around, ripe with luscious visuals and haunting sound design and an unforgettable parable about wanting and knowledge, "The Mirror" is a dense, grinding, slow-moving love song to memory and the passage of time. "Andrei Rublev" is the sort of sprawling masterwork that deserves several rewatches before I would really want to attest its glory. "Solaris" and "Ivan's Childhood" are on the to-watch shortlist, but in early August I needed a break from all the tough films I'd been chewing through. I decided to watch a short anime series with good recommendations, "Ping Pong: The Animation," directed by Masaaki Yuasa, but instead settled on his show "The Tatami Galaxy" which ran in 2011.

"Galaxy" is something I want to write a whole bunch of words about, because it so charmed me that I felt a compulsion to see everything Yuasa has directed. Essentially, "Galaxy" is about a college-aged man who continually fails to grasp the life in front of him while yearning for an opportunity to correct his past mistakes. The strong pull of this yearning brings about disaster after disaster, until ultimately the hero is confronted with the vast nothingness of a life un-lived. The show vibrates with a love of humanity, with compassion and empathy for a man who is coming into adulthood with a prescribed notion of what it means to grow up and find love, and it pulls the emotional heartstrings just right. "Galaxy" also teems with brilliant comedy, from the simple meta-humor of an all-knowing fortune teller to the increasingly slickly contrived club dalliances of the protagonist, coming to a head when he joins an Amway-esque selling scheme/full-blown cult.  The show is brought to life with art, character design, and animation that are often deliberately ugly or obtuse, and a mostly wistful soundtrack with excellent classical instrumentation. It is more or less a masterpiece from all angles.

Long before "Ping Pong" or "The Tatami Galaxy," though, came "Mind Game." It is the only feature-length film Yuasa has directed, to my knowledge, and his first full-fledged directorial work. The above image is the film's opening shot, and despite the somewhat muddled palette (which is a significant departure from the majority of the film) it conveys to me a great deal of the feel of the whole work. There's a great sense of mystery about the man sitting behind the wheel of this car, and we wonder what he could be looking at, or for. When a young woman suddenly rushes past in the rain, and a passenger of the car takes off running towards her, it gives the impression that we might be in for some sort of crime thriller, or detective drama. When we get a full look at the man's attire, we see that he might just be a little...odd. Running with a soccer ball in his right hand, wearing a soccer uniform, sure, fine, I get that. But why is this adult man wearing a diaper on top of his soccer uniform?

Anyways, the young woman makes it to the train just a few seconds late, and her foot gets caught in the door, allowing Mr. Diaper to board another car behind her. On the train the young woman is announced as Myon, identified as such by her childhood friend Nishi, an aspiring Manga artist plainly clinging desperately to his childhood crush. The opening sequence is punctuated by an utterly baffling montage of flashback clips which hum by at a pace deliberately designed to confuse, the titles pop up, and away we go. Nishi is in love with Myon, and Myon may be in love with Nishi, but their mutual shyness lead them apart in high school and has carried through to their college years. Now Myon is preparing to marry a handsome yet dull laborer named Ryo, even as Nishi imagines fantastical scenarios where he confesses his feelings and runs off into the sunset with his woman in tow. It is in these opening scenes that we see one of the many interesting artistic choices Yuasa made for this film (and would revisit, though quite differently, in "Galaxy"); namely, the use of real-world photography to capture particularly comical or stressful faces in a fashion that drawing cannot imitate.

The cutout-like appearance of these human faces pushes some of the earlier, more seriously dramatic sequences into a comical space, though it does reach a sort of uncomfortable space a few minutes later when Mr. Diaper is suddenly threatening to sexually assault Myon. To cut to the chase, Myon and her sister have a generally delinquent father who owes Mr. Diaper and the Driver something important, and Mr. Diaper ends up with his pistol aimed through the buttocks of a hunched-over Nishi. Nishi upsets Mr. Diaper, and ends up dead. While in limbo we see the film's most literal "Mind Game," as the film's higher power playfully recreates the scene of Nishi's death in a sort of polygonal fashion reminiscent of classic 90s PC games.

Unwilling to admit defeat, Nishi outruns a constantly-warping God and hops through a portal back to life, this time kicking the gun away and blowing out the brains of Mr. Diaper. He hops in the Driver's car with the women in back and a whole fleet of Yakuza in hot pursuit. This playful pursuit sequence sees frequently visited crime film tropes inverted (an evil mob boss delivers a menacing monologue, only to be told fearlessly that he must be reading from a prompter) and other expectations perfectly delivered upon (a slapsticky bit where a gangster discovers he can run at exceptional speed only to slam into a wall in pursuit). Ultimately, our heroes are cornered, at least until they ramp off of a bridge and into the maw of an enormous whale.

Inside the whale they meet an old man, who has been taking up residence in this particular beast for more than thirty years, surviving on the delicious fish and wasted remnants of human society that make their way inside. The man has resigned himself to his comfortable existence inside the whale, making friends with some sort of ostrich-like creature that clearly provided a design inspiration for Yuasa's later series "Kaiba." The youths are not so eager, and their efforts to escape are thwarted. Nishi feels beaten, and gives up hope, until he recognizes the agonies suffered by the old man and his enduring spirit in the face of such hopelessness. Embracing their new existences, each of the characters get back in touch with parts of themselves they had lost. Nishi begins to draw and thinks of stories he will one day write, Myon rediscovers her love of swimming, the old man recalls the loving warmth of other humans, and Yan (the sister)...well...I think this next image speaks more than words possibly could.

It is the trippy visual imagery of sequences like this one that really makes me appreciate Yuasa's pliability as a director. Both this film and his various television series surge with a deeply human pathos and sharp insight into what makes us tick, but they frequently attack us through images that are meticulously separated from real-world experience. The screen becomes awash with bright, beautiful, stunning neon colors, with interesting adjustments to perspective and asymmetrical drawing styles a norm. Homage is paid to nearly every imaginable style of animation, from classical early Disney and Warner Brothers to Tezuka and other Japanese artists I'm sure a more well-read scholar than I could cite. A giant plant carrying dinosaur dung runs away from miniaturized humans inside the stomach of a main character. The hero-artist envisions himself as a sharply dressed mega-popular savior to the human race, complete with dramatic freeze-frame closeups. And in one of the film's most memorable sequences, sexual intercourse is broken down into an almost insectile melting of human bodies, with far from subtle metaphorical reference to coal train engines thrown in for good measure.

The film's climax is, rather logically, yet another pursuit. By this point, though, the intensely dire escape from the whale is as symbolic as it is literal. The passage of time within the whale is unmarked, but we know as the whale begins to die that our characters are finally ready to break from their cocoon. As the protagonists race along the incoming tide of water from the whale's mouth, leaping off passing debris that becomes increasingly ludicrous (a tank, an airplane, finally an entire skyscraper) it becomes apparent that their race is not so much a physical one as a mental battle to escape the shackles of their past. The highly dramatic escape sequence is tense, stressful, joyous, hilarious, and, ultimately, humane. Sacrifice is not an act of giving but an act of receiving, and the future is a land of hope and opportunity.

Another montage, this time of a future, and then we are jolted back to the opening. This time, Myon makes it cleanly onto the train, and Mr. Diaper is left waiting outside. The Driver grabs a young woman by the hand and boards a train with her. Run titles, and then, parabolically, the same montage we saw before the opening titles. With hindsight, we can now see the history that lead us to these days. It is a history filled with love, yearning, ambition, hope, and optimism. It also simmers with the scary possibilities of rejection and defeat. Ultimately, though, it looks skyward, to a bright future that will only be what we make of it.

"Mind Game" is a real trip, all told. It asks very little of the viewer except an open mind and a willingness to self-reflect. Other than the outburst of violence very early on, it's a pretty generous and kind film. It's a visual and auditory feast, slicing from style to style with grace and fluidity. It gives us a lovable group of misfits and tells us all we need to know about them by mixing and matching bluntness and omission where Yuasa sees fit. I loved "Mind Game" because it so brilliantly sets the stage for the rest of Yuasa's career to date. The film is silly yet sincere, gluttonous yet gracious, and hopeful in the face of hopelessness. It draws upon timeless fonts of storytelling while remaining fresh and vibrant. Like Yuasa's other works, it made me want to better myself. Sometimes, we need to stay in. Other times, we need to break out.