Mind Game (2004)

February 7, 2025 12:17 PM

"Nishi is a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place."

For a person who doesn't see many mangas, this over-the-top wild ride is insane. Hundreds of psychedelic styles are thrown together one after the other in an endless stream of strange subconsciousness. Visually inventive, experimentally uninhibited, fast and non-stop weirdness, it's like nearly nothing else I've ever seen.

The trailer.

💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes.

4.2 on Letterboxd.

7.7. on IMDb.

posted by growabrain (3 comments total)

Definitely one of the most animated films ever made. The frantic whale escape sequence scored with a drum solo leaves me genuinely drained at the end of it every time.
posted by figurant at 12:56 PM on February 7

This is a crazy, crazy movie. "Most animated film ever made," indeed.
posted by mrphancy at 1:23 PM on February 7

Sometimes a movie is so aggressively extra that it sort of wraps around to becoming meh, and I feel like that kind of happened here. I gotta say, though: there aren't a lot of movies where someone rips a gun out of someone's hand using only their clenched buttcheeks, but this is definitely one of them.
posted by phooky at 9:25 AM on February 8