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Life & Arts

Two anime offerings break stereotypes

by AUSTIN HAVICAN
The Daily Cougar

Most people brush it off as juvenile and nerdy, while others dedicate the entirety of their money and free time to it. It's almost completely impossible to find a middle ground between these two extremes when it comes to anime.

Anime, or stylized Japanese animation, is almost immediately identifiable when contrasted with other types of feature-length films. Anime characters usually have large, pointed eyes and sharp, colorful hair, and represent hyperboles of standard characters -- in both physique and disposition.

For the curious and normally uninterested, two films stand out. These films ignore action and fighting to tell interesting stories and pose philosophical questions. To be honest, they're pretty much the only two I'll watch.

‘Cat Soup'

In a family of quiet white kittens who act like humans, Nyatta, the younger brother of Nyaako, finds Death walking his sickly sister away from their home. Nyatta catches up to the shaman and his sister, and the two play tug-of-war with Nyaako's soul. It rips into two parts, and Nyatta runs home to put it back inside his dead sister. She isn't restored, but instead walks around brain-dead and bored.

Nyatta decides to search for the other half of her soul, which leads to a fantastic odyssey where mechanical butterflies help the kittens navigate a metallic river and a pig offers his hindquarters for dinner.

Only 34 minutes long and with only a few text bubbles of conversation, the 2001 feature becomes a mirage of debatable hallucinations of a kitten trying to help his sister.

What does the orange flower mean? Why does the circus tent look exactly like the frozen tidal wave? Which kitten is actually dead? The questions are hard to answer, and repeated viewings (and director commentary) alter your interpretation every time.

‘Mind Game'

In this 2004 full-length film, Nishi is a nervous loser who's never told his old girlfriend, Myon, how he felt about her after they had lost touch. When she tells Nishi she's to be married, Nishi begins to wonder why he's such a wimp. 

The two decide to eat at Myon's family restaurant when two yakuza come in demanding money from Myon's father. Nishi wimpers under the bar. To prove a point, one of the yakuza puts a gun in his butt and pulls the trigger, instantly sending Nishi somewhere else.

As bizarre as it sounds at first, Mind Game gets much more interesting when Nishi runs away from God (who changes shape, since Nishi's indecisiveness can't place what he or she should look like) and goes back to Earth minutes before he's killed. Nishi decides to live life to the fullest and kills the yakuza instead. Nishi, Myon and her sister flee the scene in a car, ramp off a bridge and are swallowed by a whale.

From the moment they meet an old man in the whale, the three undergo deep periods of self-reflection and confusion, while cut scenes switch between memories, hallucinations and an entire scope of the characters' future actions and the world. Mind Game is hyper-stylized with a variety of animation methods, including film, and frequently switches between highly detailed segments and abstract cartoons. 

The film also has multiple complex scenes that last only a few minutes, one of which is a glimpse at Nishi's text message, which represents the larger theme of the film: "Your life is the result of your own decision."

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