Masaaki Yuasa's feature debut is a visually explosive ride about a young man getting a second shot at life.

“Fear takes the shape we're willing to give it.”

Quiz time: what happens when you let Masaaki Yuasa roam freely on a film adaptation of Robin Nishi’s manga Mind Game? Answer: you get just about the most extraordinary piece of anime history. Yuasa’s film is a wacky, kaleidoscopic, completely off-the-wall anime that pushes boundaries beyond anywhere we could have imagined. There’s even a scene where the main character meets God, who – in true Yuasa fashion – morphs into various bizarre life forms, most notably a goldfish smoking a cigarette. On paper, none of it should work. But with Yuasa at the helm, impossibilities become miracles, and chaos transforms into art.

At the heart of this anarchic fever dream lies Nishi, a young man hopelessly in love with his childhood sweetheart, Myon. Now adults, Nishi dreams of marrying her and becoming a manga artist, but Myon has already accepted a proposal from someone else. However, a fateful encounter with a couple of yakuza at Myon’s family dinner upends their lives, plunging them head-first into a wild adventure. With a newly acquired look on life, he, Myon, and her sister escape the yakuza into a most unlikely location where they meet an old man…

Words can hardly capture the expressiveness of Yuasa’s feature debut. It’s a frenetic, delirious, and visually explosive ride that feels like it could have been conjured in a hallucinatory dream. Employing an eclectic mix of techniques – rotoscoping, pencil sketches, watercolours, CGI, and even papercraft –Mind Game is a testament to animation’s limitless potential. And then there’s that jaw-dropping climax, where Nishi literally runs on molecules of air. This, dear animation fans, isn’t just anime. It’s art.

This program screened as part of Kaboom Animation Festival 2025

Showing in this program

Leader 2025 flat

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Mind Game

• Masaaki Yuasa
• Japan, 2004
• 103 min.

Nishi has always loved Myon since they were little. And now as adults, he wants to pursue his dream of becoming a manga artist and marrying his childhood sweetheart. There's one problem, though. She's already been proposed to and thinks Nishi is too much of a wimp. But upon meeting the fiancé while at her family's diner and accepting him as a good guy, they encounter a couple of yakuza, only to ha