A guy gets shot in the ass, meets God as a rapid-fire carousel of faces, and runs the wrong direction into a second chance at living. From that moment on, Mind Game stops asking permission and just breaks every rule it can find, style-shifting through animation techniques that shouldn't work together but do, all while keeping you laughing instead of lost. The movie knows its message is simple, live harder, so it spends 104 minutes proving that simplicity doesn't have to mean boring, that a story about trying to save someone can be both genuinely funny and visually relentless.
Nishi is a coward, an awkward young manga artist in Osaka who has carried a torch for his childhood sweetheart Myon for years. When gangsters come to collect a debt at her family's yakitori restaurant, he is too timid to protect her, and a soccer-playing psychopath shoots him in the backside. That lands him in a bizarre afterlife where God, a figure who keeps changing shape, tells him to walk toward the light. Nishi does the only logical thing. He bolts in the opposite direction and crashes back into the living world, fundamentally transformed by his brush with death. Now he wants to seize every moment. Knowing how the attack will unfold, he turns it to his advantage, steals a car and flees with Myon and her sister while the yakuza open fire. What starts as a slapstick descent into the absurd becomes something wilder: a story about living without regrets. Director Masaaki Yuasa, making his feature debut, bends reality with constantly shifting visuals, mixing comedy, romance and psychological strangeness.
