Life has no rewind button, but film does. Yuasa Masaaki’s 2004 feature debut, MIND GAME, is a bizarre masterpiece that pushes that possibility to its absolute limit. Based on the manga of the same name by Robin Nishi, the film begins when Nishi, a timid aspiring manga artist, is abruptly gunned down by a yakuza in front of his first love. But Nishi refuses to accept death before God and races backward into life. After a desperate flight, Nishi and his companions find themselves trapped inside the belly of a whale, where their ensuing escapades explode across the screen like fireworks in a riotous mix of live action, collage, oil painting, and scribbled drawings. The film’s true invention lies in how every moment that appears to be a display of stylistic bravado is, in fact, an expression of the sheer life force of someone who has chosen to live again. Winner of the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Ofuji Noburo Award, MIND GAME marked the beginning of Yuasa’s international recognition and established a vision of freedom that would later flourish in The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl and Lu Over the Wall. The exhilarating sense of liberation delivered by its breathless climactic escape sequence is reason enough to experience the film in a theater. (SONG Kyung-won)