“We cannot know which shores the wave will carry us to until the very end,” said Masaaki Yuasa, a pioneer of Japanese animation known for his outré and visionary style. One of his works, Mind Game (2004), was an avant-garde piece in the post-cinematic era. 

Animation Beyond Continuity

Unlike traditional film, which attempts to create flawless continuity and impose ideology. Animation uses nonlinear, post-continuity editing to open up new possibilities for moving images and push the boundaries of cinematic expression and technology. In the book The Virtual Life of Film, Rodowick argues that the cinema has undergone a significant shift. The digital components have been replacing mechanical and chemical elements in cinema. This allows many films in the post-cinematic era, including animation, to move beyond the apparatus theory of the 70s. The concept of the “multiplanar machine” was introduced by Lamarre in 2009 to emphasise the uniquely chaotic nature of anime compared to other films by how its technical and material aspects give unlimited room for creative outcomes. 

Mind Game as Chaotic Cinema

Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game (2004) is an excellent example of the multiplanar machine theory that showcases anime as a form of chaotic cinema in the post-cinematic era. In Mind Game, Yuasa built a robust and frenetic energy through many montage scenes, shifting from two-dimensional to three-dimensional and employing diverse drawing styles, from hand-drawn animation to psychedelic visuals. Characters, backgrounds, and effects are drawn on separate transparent planes and layered together, making manipulating each layer’s independent movement easy. This nature of anime disrupts traditional notions of space, time, and perspective in cinema, creating a depth and dynamic cinema experience for the audience. 

The off-and-on waves seemingly push irregularly without a clear purpose, gradually reshaping the shore over time.

Chaos cinema isn’t about disorder for confusion’s sake but using fragments to form a cohesive narrative. Mind Game allows the audience to interpret the anime, creating a mind game for them, immersing them in sensory overload when they still have to piece together the plot from the disjointed images. The notion of “your life is your own decision” is repeated throughout the storyline, built by fragment scenes of how the characters decide in the dilemmas, showing the power they hold to determine their life. For instance, in the scene inside the whale, Nishi and Myon meet an old man living there for thirty years. They then become accustomed to life inside the whale before trying to escape. This part referenced the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Three of them confront what they had been avoiding in real life, and eventually, as the biblical story goes, “the hero appears to die but is revived. The hero’s old self has died, and a new one has been born.” 

Mind Game shows that chaos isn’t aimless; it pieces together a transformation story and forms order. Through fragmented montages and overwhelming visuals, Yuasa challenges the audience with unpredictability, leading them to find meaning in chaos life, meaning in chaos life.  

Reference:

Rodowick, D.N. (2015) What Was Cinema? The Virtual Life of Film.

Lamarre, T. (2009) The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ratelle, A. (2017) ‘Book review: Anime Aesthetics: Japanese Animation and the “Post-Cinematic” Imagination’, Animation, 12(2), pp. 191–194. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847717710737 

TV Tropes (n.d.) ‘Mind Game’. Available at: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/MindGame 

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