Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game
BAM and The Baffler are pleased to present the following screening of Masaaki Yuasa’s 2004 animated film Mind Game.
The DEA’s Drug Fact Sheet warns that ketamine can take you to “K-Land,” producing a “mellow & colorful” out-of-body experience. There’s no ketamine in Mind Game, and it’s never mellow—but something in Yuasa’s animation epitomizes K-Land, with its shifting, palsied perspectives, explosive colors, and drifting camera; its hero even floats out of his body at one point. Its giddy, grotesque kaleidoscope is as close as you’ll come to Ketamine: The Motion Picture.
Mind Game will be introduced by Dan Piepenbring, who considers both the current ketamine vogue and the nineteenth-century fascination with nitrous and ether in his article “K-Pop,” his contribution to our latest issue, “Altered States.”
Masaaki Yuasa
Mind Game
2004, 103 min, DCP