MIND GAME
Dir. Masaaki Yuasa
2004

This piece contains spoilers for the film Mind Game.

GKids released a wonderful Masaaki Yuasa boxset last year which meant I finally got to see Mind Game in proper high definition. It was almost like seeing it again for the first time, the vibrant colors of the film’s musical sequences shining bright a clean, the tiny details of the climactic sprint fully visible to me for the first time. I’ve mostly been rewatching my favorite film on a 480p file I got from Prof. Ridgely’s course on anime I took in 2012. At the time, there had been no official Western release of the film.

Mind Game portrays a young broke mangaka named Nishi who nurses a jealous crush on his childhood sweetheart Myon. They nearly went on a date once in high school, but got too shy to ever pursue it. When they reunite at the start of the film, she’s engaged to a nice, successful young man – and is being pursued by two yakuza seeking revenge on her womanizing father. When Nishi comes between Myon and the temperamental Atsu, he’s shot dead. Seeking to humiliate him, God shows him this death on a giant screen, on a hundred giant screens, looped, represented in 3D models, in slow motion, even in text. Then God tells him to surrender to oblivion – the afterlife is nothingness.

When I’m faced with anxiety about a hypothetical risky situation, I maybe too quickly default to “the worst thing that happens is we die, and then we don’t have to worry about it anymore.” It’s a coping mechanism I’ve learned after a lot of unwelcome surprises in my young adult life. It keeps me from getting bogged down in the “but what happens ifs” and leading me toward the “so what do we do about its.” It maybe makes me complacent sometimes. Those pain points can be dealt with later, because pain isn’t fatal.

When I was still dating, this made it easy to ask people out, as getting a “no” back doesn’t leave me dead or in jail. Just asking to spend time together and then being pleasant to be around is, it turns out, also the secret to adult friendships – who knew? When it came time to uproot from Buffalo Grove and move to Nashville, this mentality kept me from considering cold feet. When it came time to leave Nashville and come back to Madison, it kept losing our apartment from creating total despair. When I think about somehow turning writing and media analysis into a career, this mentality turns waiting another few years until I’m in a “better place to write” into a pain point rather than an existential crisis. When jobs previous to the one I’m in now burdened me with overwork and too much responsibility with no increase in pay, I would say, “this too shall pass.” When I think about addressing my nonbinary identity, I have said “I don’t really want to get into all that right now” – that, at least, is starting to change.

This philosophy creates a tapestry of decisions and indecisions. Some are healthy and fun.  Others are stupid and painful. There are decisions that have no especially value-based consequence. Some people I’ve known react to it as optimism – that I refuse to give into despair. Others sense that it might be a form of nihilistic despair itself, that there’s a feeling that there’s no way to improve things beyond “at least we’re not dead.” I feel it both ways. I’m not convinced it’s healthy. I’m not convinced it isn’t, either.

After sharing this mentality with my therapist a few times, I was thinking about how this mentality relates to the compartmentalization of gaming. In video games, if you fail, you can always just start the game over. And you haven’t lost until you actually hit “game over,” in Tetris or in a Halo lobby. Losing the battle doesn’t mean losing the war. Any pain is only temporary (and, in a game, only “real” in the emotional sense.) Learning to accept the risk of defeat will make you a way better gamer – it makes it easier to learn from your mistakes in the moment, not give in to the anxiety of losing, and allows you to take greater risks without being so protective. Once you’ve learned enough mastery, you can recognize what’s actually worth protecting.

Nishiki sobs at first, but then he realizes that God is headed back toward life itself. He decides he’s not going to give in, that he’s not going to let it end this way. He sprints back to life and takes the second chance he’s been given in a manic stride, killing Atsu, stealing the other older officer’s car, and kidnapping Myon (and her sister, Yan.) They end up in a violent car chase, driving off a bridge, and being saved only by the grace of a blue whale swallowing the car whole. So begins the true movie of Mind Game – a modern riff on Jonah and the Whale.

Inside this whale, our trio meets a nameless hermit – he’s survived at least thirty years inside the belly of the beast, himself escaping a criminal past. He’s collected an incredible wealth of treasures within his shelter and made friends with a Jurassic pal. Inside the whale, Nishi, Myon, and Yan find new life. It’s a place for play without commerce, without social expectation beyond the family, without the concept of competition. In a lot of ways, this becomes a sex comedy for a while. It’s a mess, and the way it handles one character’s sexual exploration is even messier.

The way this sequence is filmed is unbelievable – it is so colorful, so fantastical, so lively. Masaaki Yuasa is largely known as a master of setting animation to vibrant color and danceable music. You can go back to his earliest credits on Crayon Shin Chan and Chibi Maruko-Chan, to his first animated sequences, and see the kind of blissed out work he does in that setting. To me, it’s ecstatic. Some people would describe it as “trippy,” others synesthetic. I see also Merrie Melodies and Looney Toons, the origins of character cartooning. This film enters development shortly after the Superflat exhibition opens in Japan and begins to tour internationally. Mind Game isn’t coherent with the philosophical cynicism of Superflat as a movement (that distinction goes to Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space,) but I can see a line between their postmodern visions of color and iconography.

The end of the time in the whale comes and we head toward the film’s climax. Our heroes hatch their escape plan. After their race back to life, a montage plays of these characters’ entire 20th century ancestry. Every small decision in their lives is played in sequence, creating an apparent butterfly effect chain of every choice and non-choice made by our characters. Nishi’s high school heartbreak, the hermit leaving home for the last time, Atsu’s yakuza boss being raised as the patriarch. It is a tapestry of decisions followed by a final epitaph affirming life.

Just before their climactic attempt at escape, Nishi deflects the fear the hermit expresses about trying to escape the whale. Nishiki declares: 

“So what! I wanna get out! ‘Cos there’s so much out there! So many different people, living different lives! Incredibly good guys, bad guys… Folks completely different from us! It’s one huge melting pot! See, it’s not about success, dying in the streets, who’s better, who’s not! I just want to be a part of it! I realized that even if I’ve no connections, no talent, even if I’m one big loser, I want to use my hands and feet to think and move, to shape my own life! We can just die here or we can try, see what we’ve got!”

This movie is my heart. It’s my favorite.