The best thing out of Japan since Princess Mononoke

For reals. I think this is the best thing out of Japan since Princess Mononoke.

This movie does not push the typical buttons of your typical viewer.

Most films are designed to push a certain set of expected buttons in a certain way in the typical viewer, and if all the buttons are adequately pushed the person declares it 'good'.

Mind Game does not try to do that. It came up with it's own style, it's own set of buttons. And for this reason, many of the buttons people expect to be pushed when watching a film do not get pushed and thus it fails to impress. So I expect alot of disagreement with this comment.

People say "but it wasnt like this" or "it didn't have that". And thus you don't like it.

But I believe this is largely because what it DOES have is flying right over head.

You see all these weird images in Mind Game, changes of style, of pace. Most watchers probably think 'cool' thats 'artsy' or 'there trying to be different'. What I think your missing is that those weird visuals ARE the story.

Mind Game is a visual story more than anything else, the words are secondary to the visuals in conveying the story. If you analyze Mind Game like you do typical films, if you watch in the same mindset you watch most other movies where you take in words, plot, character types, fit it all into a bunch of word categories and compare. It will fail to impress. However if you watch Mind Game as a visual flow, and compare it to things as a Visual Flow, it has few competitors.

I know word-loving people like to think that writing words is some radically diffucult thing to do and thus place written story at the height of achievement. But producing images is more diffucult than writing words. Case in point, many people can write, few can draw. I respect visuals more than I do words. This is why I like Mind Game more than pretty much every other animated film that has a good story 'in words'. Mind Games story in visuals is better than almost everything else in Japan in words.

And this isn't to pay homage to 'ooh bright flashy, colorful' Something like Dead Leaves is an example of that, which I don't like much. Mind Game has context, meaning and complex emotion to all of it's visuals. It goes places visually other things haven't dared to go. It accomplishes so many new things visually that no other animation has. It's for this reason I rate it above even the most recent Studio Ghibli stuff.

Cause I mean, at this point in time I think Ghibli is cliche. Anything like NGE, Bebop, Naruto. It's all cliche. It's dying. Studio4c is the new style.