Critics reviews

Numerous animation techniques are deployed to depict a willfully random story designed to make its protagonist’s—and your—mind go ka-blam. In yea olden times, they called this sort of thing a “head movie.” Be prepared, though: It’s noisier and ruder than, say, Fantastic Planet or The Holy Mountain.

The exhilarating Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy Mind Game plays out like a hallucinogen-fueled shaggy-dog joke that only ends after twenty-year-old horndog Nishi (Kôji Imada) discovers that the world does not revolve around him.

A fantastically executed assemblage of animated flotsam punctuated with moments of dry humour and a heartbreaking final montage which gives the film its message – make every moment count. If Jan Svankmajer ever considered a move to Anime, it may look something like this.

[Mind Game] is a sometimes enthralling, sometimes exhausting tour de force... Its plot is tangled and meandering, as is often the case with feature-length anime, but its visual textures and rhythms are fresh and strange.

Mind Game is not just one of the most fantastically experimental anime features seen stateside. It’s a superflat cousin to the grown-up cartoon head trips of the ’60s and ’70s like Yellow Submarine, Fritz the Cat, or Fantastic Planet, replete with grand metaphysical themes, gloriously extended avant-psychedelic sequences, and Japanified bits of Bakshian bawdiness.

[A] brain-teasing, wildly unpredictable animated feature — that sometimes masquerades as traditional anime — periodically shifts graphic gears to present a cacophony of varied abstract drawing styles... [Mind Game is a] freewheeling juggernaut of a head-trip, its assorted visual treatments rendered in relative degrees of awkwardness and artfulness