by RAF KATIGBAK | More Fantasia Festival: The Dark Hours » Firecracker

About once every decade, an animated-film director manages to create a work that finds the perfect blend of innovative, mind-blowing visuals and emotive, engaging content. Russian animation master Yuri Norstein did it in the late ’70s with his masterpiece Tale of Tales, while in the late ’80s, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira transcended the limits of two dimensions and became an instant classic. With Mind Game, Japan’s Yuasa Masaaki (previously the animation director on the half-hour psychedelic odyssey Cat Soup) joins their ranks.

The story revolves around Nishi, a hapless young manga artist who, while catching up with his enormously endowed ex-girlfriend Miyo, is killed in a most embarrassing way by a yakuza who’s come to claim money. Nishi manages to escape the afterlife and relive the final moments of his life. Rescuing Miyo and her sister, Nishi begins a hair-raising car chase through Osaka, eventually ending up swallowed by a whale.

From there, things start to get weird.

Mind Game is a story about self-determination, destiny and living without regret. But what will surely catapult Mind Game to classic status is how the story is told. With a wonderful sense of colour and timing, Masaaki plays fast and loose with a multitude of animation techniques, including digital rotoscoping (like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life), to bring the story, at once hilarious, sensual and psychedelic, to life. The Mirror caught up with Masaaki to talk about dreams, destiny and how to teach kids right and wrong.

Mirror: This film is based on the manga [Japanese comic] by Robin Nishi, which was told in a very personal style. Was the film very personal for you?

Yuasa Masaaki: This movie is personal for me also! I expressed the parts that made sense to me directly in the film. If I couldn’t, I tried to change, delete or add a scene to my understanding.

M: The original manga was drawn loosely, as if it were improvised. In the animation medium, where every minute represents hours of work, was it hard to keep the feeling of the film fresh, wild and raw?

YM: I don’t think that it was hard to keep the film fresh, but it was difficult to share the subtle nuances and feelings in the film with my staff.

M: The film also had this wonderful dream quality, like you weren’t sure where it was going next. Do your dreams influence your life?

YM: I hardly ever remember my dreams.

M: Mind Game deals a lot with feelings of regret, and making the most out of life. If you were in Nishi’s situation and could return from heaven, what would you do differently?

YM: I would love to do something outside the office, something different from office work.

Sax and violence

M: I’m starting to see a trend in music, art and cinema where the message is very positive and life-affirming. Do you think this is a reaction to a darker trend in animation and maybe the current state of our world?

YM: I believe that people became too smart, and became preoccupied with a lot of bad thoughts.

M: I heard you did not see Waking Life—what film influences did you have? Are you influenced by music as well?

YM: I’m influenced by all my favourite movies, such as E.T. and The World According to Garp. I listen to music that I think is suitable for each movie. For example, I listened to the saxophonist Hans Dulfer during the making of Mind Game and Radiohead for the film Cat Soup.

M: Your film briefly mentions how Tokyo is serving Westernized sushi. How do you feel about Westernization?

YM: Japan has adopted many different kinds of culture. We have not only been Westernized, but also influenced by other Eastern countries. Mind Game demonstrates this reality as it is.

M: Given some of the sexual and violent content, were you surprised that it got a General Audience rating in Japan? Do you think young people should be allowed to handle these types of subject matter?

YM: Yes, it was surprising. Young people should learn about moral issues not only from movies, but from many different kinds of sources, by themselves. Restraining them from watching PG-rated movies would not help them to have judgements of right and wrong, to be moral beings.

Yuasa Masaaki presents Mind Game at the Hall Theatre on Friday, July 8, 7:30 p.m., with other screenings at Salle J.A. de Sève on Sunday, July 10, 2:20 p.m., and on Tuesday, July 12, 3 p.m.

Fantasia round-up:
week one

>> A swashbuckling bloodbath, a serial killer and a variety of ghosts

Izo

Leave it to director Takashi Miike to take his first attempt at the traditionalist Japanese samurai swashbuckler genre and subvert it into a vengeful two-hour metaphysical hell-ride bloodbath that defies any linear notions of time, space and logic. But the film is not only a gratuitous marathon of gallons and gallons of squishy-sounding blood spurts, triple-digit time-travelling body counts and knife-wielding real-estate vampires (you heard it right), it’s also Miike’s cinematic essay on war, violence and other evil-type stuff. After the final credits have rolled, and Miike has finished exorcising all his inner and outer demons, you won’t feel as though you’ve watched Izo so much as survived it. (Raf Katigbak) At the Hall Theatre on Saturday, July 9, 9:20 p.m., and on Monday, July 18, 5 p.m.

The Taste of Tea

Playing effective counterpoint to the heat, speed and noise of so many of the other cool, new Japanese flicks at the festival this year, director Katsuhito Ishii’s thoughtful and unpredictable comedy The Taste of Tea is a remarkably patient and peaceful film. Which isn’t to say this exercise in quiet magic realism is boring. Rather, the calm tone allows the surrealist elements—the gangster ghost, the giant imaginary schoolgirl, the train exiting a teen’s forehead—to roll by in the most graceful, natural manner. The Taste of Tea is essentially an extended visit with the marvellously oddball Haruno family, and is graced by performances by some of Japan’s hippest character actors, including Tadanobu Asano and the sublimely cool Susumu Terajima. (Rupert Bottenberg) At the Hall Theatre on Sunday, July 10, 7:05 p.m., and at Salle J.A. De Sève on Wednesday, July 13, 9:30 p.m.

Shutter

Following a late-night hit-and-run, budding couple Tun and Jane start seeing strange shadows and rays of light in photographs, not to mention real-life flashes of their victim, a girl with long, black hair and a penchant for the Kubrick stare. Yes, this is most definitely another derivative post-Ring horror film, but Thai directors Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom inject some genuine twists and scares into their macabre mystery, both the cheap jump-in-your-seat kind and the chillers that crawl slowly up your spine. (Lorraine Carpenter) At the Hall Theatre on Friday, July 8, 9:45 p.m., and at Salle J.A. De Sève on Saturday, July 16, 11:45 p.m.

Zee Oui

It’s not easy to shed a sympathetic light on a serial child-killer. But somehow directors Nida Sudasna and Buranee Rachjaibun manage to do just that in this provocative Thai thriller. Stripped straight from the headlines, the film revisits the tragic life of Chinese peasant Li Hui. In search of a better life, the sickly young man migrates to the Thailand province of Rayong, where everyone mispronounces his name as “Zee Oui.” But name-calling is the least of his worries. A victim of racism and classism, the asthmatic loner finds himself being degraded in every way imaginable, including a delousing that will make your scalp recoil. It’s only after several slave-labour jobs—most notably a gig at a chicken-slaughter house, where the doomed birds are treated more humanely than the short-winded expatriate—that we see Li Hui slowly turn into a heart-hungry savage. Scary, sad and true. (Sarah Rowland) With co-director Buranee Rachjaibun presenting at the Hall Theatre on Wednesday, July 13, 9:40 p.m.

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