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[personal profile] randy_byers
Well, Mind Game is a head trip, there's no doubt about it. It's only available on a Japanese DVD, but as Ed Halter says in the Village Voice, "undoubtedly there are American otakus popping this one into multi-region DVD players right now amid the glorbeling of bong hits." You looking at me, Ed? I ain't no otaku, man!

The movie is based on the manga by Robin Nishi, which also happens to be the name of the protagonist, and there's an air of the confessional about some aspects of the story. I actually find the semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man aspects a bit tedious. The first half hour falls into the genre of the fantasy of excruciating humiliation, never one of my favorites. Still, there's enough clever perspective to keep things rolling, and the second half of the movie is an amazing fantasia. Opening and ending the movie are two montages of scattered imagery that are connected to the main story, but after two viewings I'm still not sure how or if it all fits together. Not sure the story is supposed to make logical sense, for that matter. It's another adventure into dreamland, like Paprika.

The plot (SPOILERS ho!), such as it is, involves a twenty-year-old otaku and manga-artist-wannabe who pines uselessly for his beautiful, breasty childhood girlfriend. An encounter with two yakuza in a restaurant ends with him getting killed (in an extremely humiliating fashion), confronting G-O-D in the afterworld, and then apparently returning to life for a second try. This is where the movie really takes off, as Robin, his beloved, and her sister embark on a wild chase that leads them into the belly of a whale and a remarkable inner world.

Whether anything in the latter part of the film is real or not is hard to say and probably beside the point. The philosophy exhorted is basically "seize the day," which is banal enough in its own way, but the sheer vital exuberance of the visual creativity on display is a winning embodiment of the idea. As in FLCL (2000) -- to which this film may well be a response -- the animation style is all over the place, changing rapidly from scene to scene and even within scenes. There is a brilliant sex scene in which the bodies turn into abstract rivers of flowing, gushing paint, intercut with shots of a cheerful cartoon train busting through barrier after barrier on the way up a mountainside. The sequence inside the whale seems to be all about the creative process, and we get the feeling that we are exploring the pre-rational depths of the artist's mind, that it is exploding onto the screen in front of us, unleashed, primal, protean, but at the same time delicate, earthy, sweet, and funny.

The main problem with the movie is that Robin is not a very interesting character to hang this all on, and the philosophy of life he develops is not very profound. But the fountain of brilliant, playful imagery and the sense of creative possibility at the core of the film more than make up for it. If I were a true otaku, I'd probably go through the final montage frame by frame to try to figure out how each image connects to the main story. Hm, that's not a bad idea ...

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