masaaki yuasa

Mind Game (2004)

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I’ve been incredibly lucky to see multiple movies by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa in a proper theater, where his vibrant free-for-all imagery shines in all its psychedelic glory.  While he mostly works as a showrunner for televised anime, Yuasa’s feature films Inu-Oh and Night is Short, Walk on Girl both played at local multiplexes in their initial run, and both made it clear why his expressive, imaginative visual style often gets him cited as a successor to the late Satoshi Kon.  It’s a shame I was either too young or too out of the loop to catch his debut feature Mind Game that way in 2004, but thankfully local repertory series WW Cinema recently filled in that gap.  I was instantly on board for the layered multimedia animation style of Mind Game, which quickly establishes Yuasa as a visual genius, even if only in flashes.  It took me much longer to warm up to the film’s immature nerd-boy sexuality, but I eventually got there once that got psychedelic too.  Mind Game likely would’ve been my favorite movie as a teenager had I caught it fresh, but now I can only see it as a crude prototype for Yuasa’s more recent masterworks like Inu-Oh.  Regardless, any time one of his films plays on a nearby screen is a cultural event, especially since I don’t watch nearly enough television to keep up with the bulk of his work.

Nishi is a young 20-somethings loser who’s still hung up on his childhood crush and his childhood dreams of becoming a famous manga artist but is too shy & cowardly to do anything about either.  When his crush is threatened with rape by two yakuza in her family’s diner, he fails to come to her defense, speaking up just forcefully enough to get himself shot instead of saving the day.  In the afterlife, his soul is confronted with video footage of his cowardice, then defies the orders of a shapeshifting God to fade into oblivion by instead returning to his body to fight off the rapist gangsters who killed him.  The gamble works, sending the yakuza’s victims on a wild car chase that lands them in the belly of a whale for the majority of the remaining runtime.  Then things get weird.  Inside the whale, Nishi gradually learns emotional maturity and how to genuinely connect with people instead of ogling them as a pervy outsider.  It’s character growth that somewhat helps soften the grotesque sexual assault depicted in the first half and the constant commentary on the cartoonish proportions of his love interest’s breasts – just not entirely.  The main point of the story is about learning to fully embrace life instead of cowering from it, but there is some tangible subtext in a young Yuasa beating himself up about his own social immaturity as an illustrator who’s used to living & thinking alone instead of healthily interacting with others.  The good news is that two decades later he’s demonstrated that personal maturity in Inu-Oh, which has all of the visual inventiveness of Mind Game (including gorgeous animation of mythical whales) without all the teen-boy sexual hangups souring the vibe.

As much as I’m downplaying Mind Game as one of Yuasa’s finest works, it is oddly the one I’d most readily return to for rewatch.  That’s mostly because it’s bookended by gorgeous, rapid-fire montages of isolated images that piece together a birth-to-death lifespan for its four central characters (the whale-belly captives) that I’m not sure I fully absorbed on first watch.  Yuasa gives you just enough visual information for your brain’s pattern-recognition software to piece everything together, but I’m not sure I fully trust the conclusions I reached in the theater.  For a movie that spends most of its time sitting around the belly of a whale, waiting for something to happen in existential angst, it really does throw a lot at you.  The representation of God as a kaleidoscopic collection of impossible bodies that changes shape every time you look directly at it is a major highlight, recalling Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.  There’s a funhouse mirror warping to most of the imagery that stretches through the screen to literally bend your mind, but there’s also a Tom Goes to the Mayor-esque use of crude photocopy printouts that grounds the whole thing in the rudimentary tools of its era.  All of Yuasa’s magic tricks are already proudly on display in Mind Game; it’s just a shame that his immaturity was just as loudly vibrant in this instance. Or maybe it’s just a shame that I had personally aged out of its grody nerd-boy charms before I caught up with it.

-Brandon Ledet

Inu-Oh (2022)

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I’ve only seen two anime films in theaters so far this year, but it still feels significant that both were pop musicals.  Both also happen to feature whale-themed light shows in their stadium concert fantasy sequences, as if they were both anime adaptations of The Decemberists performing “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”.  However, whereas Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle was set in an online cotton candy future-world, Masaaki Yuasa’s Inu-Oh dials the clock back to an earthtones watercolor illustration of feudal Japan.  Despite the centuries’ distance between their settings, Belle explores the merits & limitations of seeking community online, while Inu-Oh does the same for rock n’ roll fame, which can only elevate the marginalized so high before the fascists at the top take notice & shut them down.  I greatly appreciate both films as psychedelic experiments with the outer limits of animation.  I’m surprised that Inu-Oh was my favorite of the pair, though, since my tastes lean more to the ultra-modern, ultra-femme cyber-realms of Belle.

Like all the best rock operas, Inu-Oh is specifically a glam rock opera, joining the likes of Rocky Horror, Velvet Goldmine, Hedwig, and Lisztomania at the pinnacle of the art form.  Despite anchoring itself to the historical specifics of “biwa priests” providing musical entertainment for the emperors of 14th Century Japan, its story is easily relatable to anyone who’s familiar with rise-to-fame rock n’ roll myths – especially ones that involve crossdressing, glitter, and platform boots.  The biwas are electric guitars; the emperors are record execs; the shadow-puppet lightshows are proto-pyrotechnics; it’s all accessible & familiar.  Inu-Oh details the friendship & artistic collaboration between a rebel biwa priest (lead guitarist) and a freakish mutant (rock n’ roll frontman) he meets in his travels.  The biwa player is blind and perpetually mourning the childhood loss of his father.  His singing, dancing partner is a bizarre collection of physical abnormalities, an “ugly monster” covered in scales, with eyes, mouth, and limbs drifting to unlikely locations.  Through rock n’ roll, they not only find fame & respect they’ve never been afforded as ordinary citizens, but they also find the freedom to be their true selves in public for the very first time – testing the boundaries of their gender identity, political convictions, and sexual desirability in full public display.  And then, as always, The Man gets in their way.

Comparing Inu-Oh against Belle is likely a cheap shot, since anime is more of a broad artistic medium than a niche, rigid subgenre.  If anything, it more closely resembles the other cyberpunk movie musical I saw in theaters this year: Neptune Frost.  Both Inu-Oh & Neptune Frost use the propulsive, euphoric power of music to echo the momentum & rhythms of political resistance.  They’re both celebratory of the political power the disenfranchised can find in communal solidary, while also appropriately grim in detailing how futile that power can feel in the face of systemic fascism.  In particular, Inu-Oh often plays like a love letter to provocative, gender-ambiguous rock legends like Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Prince, threading them into a larger continuum of artists who challenge the political status quo.  At the same time, it reckons with the reality that a lot of similar artists on the fringe never achieve that level of fame or cultural respect; a lot of queer activists’ voices are violently snuffed out before they can be heard.  For their heart and their anger, Inu-Oh & Neptune Frost are the most politically energizing movies I’ve seen all year; they’re also the very best.

That’s not to say that Inu-Oh‘s medium isn’t a major part of its appeal.  Anime often feels like the last remaining refuge of traditional, complex animation in a world where that visual artistry is being lost to cutesy, over-simplified computer graphics.  Yuasa is highly respected in that field as one of the best of the best, thanks to psychedelic free-for-alls like Mind Game & Night is Short, Walk On Girl.  Inu-Oh matches the euphoric transcendence of its rock n’ roll music with the expressive imagination of its visual style.  When viewing the world though a blind character’s mind, we navigate a white void where sounds trigger impressions of color.  We travel backwards through the centuries in still-photo montages of devolving landscapes.  We don’t see swordfights; we see the slash of the weapon and the steam rising from the blood.  This is a gorgeous, invigorating, heartbreaking work about the bliss, power, and turmoil of rock n’ roll outsiders.  Speaking personally, it’s the best genderfucked feudal Japan glam rock opera anime I’ve ever seen, but your mileage may vary.

-Brandon Ledet

Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2018)

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My mental library of anime titles is embarrassingly shallow; if it’s not Miyazaki or Akira, I likely haven’t heard of it. As someone who cherishes the artistry of hand-drawn, traditional animation, however, I’m often a huge sucker for the stray titles from the medium I’ve seen (I was even mildly positive on the egregious Your Name.-knockoff Fireworks from earlier this year, at least as a novelty). Since the animation artistry itself is often what I’m typically drawn to in these works, it’s the freewheeling, psychedelic end of the anime spectrum that most attracts me – titles like Paprika & FLCL that indulge in dream logic sequences of fantastical mayhem simply because it looks cool. That disposition makes me the perfect audience for Masaaki Yuasa’s latest feature film, Night is Short, Walk on Girl. Surely, anime & manga die-hards familiar with the film’s source material (an eponymous novel & a television show titled Tatami Galaxy) will have a much richer contextual experience with Night is Short than I, but as a previously uninitiated appreciator of psychedelic visual indulgences, I still had a total ease in enjoying the film as a stylistic exercise isolated from extratextual concerns. A plot-light immersion in visual excess & tonal drunkenness, Night is Short is wonderful as an exhibition of the virtues of traditional animation, a chaotic night of unhinged fun that requires very little familiarity with its medium to enjoy on a purely aesthetic level.

The POV of Night is Short, Walk on Girl is split between two unnamed characters: a teen girl brazenly entering “the adult world” through a wild night of drinking & a slightly older boy who’s following her from a close distance in a hapless effort to woo her through stalking. Of course, the film is most fun when seen through the girl’s perspective, but their adventures are evenly weighted & equally absurd. “The night that felt like a year” stretches on endlessly ahead of them as they plow through cocktail bars, open-air used book markets, porno auctions, strangers’ parties, and guerilla theatre happenings all over the city of Kyoto. Time is explained to move much slower for young folks (interpreted literally in the ticking of wristwatches), so their single night of missed connections stretches on for an impossible temporal bacchanal. Besides the way youth distorts our perception of time, the film also contrasts different age ranges’ philosophies on interconnectivity. Older late-night drunks feel isolated, prone to despair, while the titular girl is so bursting with life & feelings of interconnectedness with the people of Kyoto that she sees cocktails across the city only as precious jewels to be collected as flowers bloom in the air around her. When asked “How much do you drink?” she defiantly responds, “As much as is in front of me,” spending her entire night binging on the simple, immediate joys of life while oblivious to the lovelorn boy with eyes only for her.

If I have one regret about seeing Night is Short on the big screen, it’s that I didn’t have the option to watch it dubbed. I realize that tarnishes my anime credibility more than anything else, but in a film that’s most notable for its visual achievements it would have been nice to not have been distracted by the subtitles while taking in the artistry. For all the film’s vague philosophy about youth, interconnectivity, and the passage of time, its plot mostly amounts to a frantic night of drunken, incoherent yelling. It only really comes alive as an achievement in narrative storytelling in the 15min stretch when it mutates into a full-blown musical. Otherwise, it’s the film’s poetic, freeform animation style that commands the tones & rhythms of each sequence—shifting from storybook illustration to erotic printmaking to Powerpuff Girls-style retro cutouts to whatever the mood dictates as the moment blooms. I was reminded of the recent restoration of Yellow Submarine while watching it in the theater, if not only for both films’ willingness to exploit their shared medium for the full spectrum of absurd, anti-logic indulgences it allows, whereas most modern animation feels dispiritingly restrained & unimaginative. I can’t say with any authority whether Night is Short is an especially remarkable achievement as anime, but I can say with certainty that in our modern era of CG animation doldrums, it’s an invigorating, intoxicating elixir.

-Brandon Ledet