The Psychedelic Visuals in Mind Game

 

"YES!" - God

I've been really into the works of  Masaaki Yuasa lately ever since watching Kaiba, before then I've only checked out "The Tatami Galaxy" and some episodes of  "Devilman Crybaby" but with me now getting back into anime I thought it would be good to check out Yuasa's other work. One of them being his debut film "Mind Game" and man! it so fucking sick. There's alot of stuff to talk about in the film like the way it conveys its themes of be apart of life no matter who you are or the development of the film and how Shinichi Watanabe was chosen as the music producer for this film but I'll just focus on the visuals for today and how creative it is.

This is from the same film yes.

First we'll talk about the odd mixture of live action and animation in the first half and its purpose, it may seems incredibly off putting at first (which it is since this section was supposed to be fully live action) but it serves as a distinction between the first half and the rest of the film. The first half is taking place at the outside world while the rest of the film takes place in the whale's stomach showing this weird reality that the characters live in until they drove the car unto the whale's mouth where they're cut off from society in which those visuals never appear again until the end; it cleverly depicts this as the real world without actually filming in live action like originally intended before scrapping that idea since it might be a problem as a storytelling perspective.

Another great aspect of the film is its use of color. 

These shots here shows how effective color is use here to convey mood, the top is yellow giving a more happy and laidback vibe to the scene, the middle is green showing a more unexpected and uncertain feel to the situation, and the bottom is red giving us a sense of danger and overall dread to the scene. All three scenes do a great job of using color to set the mood on screen and overall looking visually pleasing. 

Another highlight in color is the dancing scene later in the film going wild with the color palette and the animation, Yuasa had said that "Yellow Submarine" was a major inspiration and it show the most here and the second half of the movie. Seeing the characters dance in weird way while the color is always changing brings this sense of freedom and this free spirited atmosphere that make this 

film beautiful to watch.

This is like some lsd trip or something.

the last thing I wanna talk about for today is just the overall mixed media approach in the film. The film's use of live action, cgi, and 2d animation is a sight to behold; the sex scene for instance is portrayed in a very abstract and artful matter cutting from the 2d characters to a live action train, Nishi talking about his manga story idea as told through this stylized cgi, the characters last attempt to leave the whale's stomach, and the many objects in the film that are just cutouts. It's like a boiling pot of different visuals all being stirred into this soup of madness and I love it and i haven't even gone through the backgrounds or character animations but I think I'll save those for another time. I think I talked about enough about the film and I think you should check it out sometime since it's a movie that really should be experienced first hand. Here's some more screenshots from the movie (plz watch it, it's a good one):