Press Release:
New York, NY (February 7, 2018) – GKIDS is proud to present the cult classic MIND GAME, from famed anime director Masaaki Yuasa (Devilman: Crybaby, Lu Over the Wall). MIND GAME will open at the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles on February 16th with a special midnight screening, which will be duplicated exclusively at additional Landmark Theatres locations for one-night only (additional night available in select locations), and will open in New York at the Metrograph on March 2nd for a traditional theatrical run. For tickets and more information about national engagements, please visit www.mindgamemovie.com.
ABOUT MIND GAME
Buckle in and prepare to surrender yourself to an exhilarating and wildly entertaining ride. Cult classic Mind Game is an explosion of unconstrained expression – gloriously colorful images ricochet in rapid-fire associations, like Masaaki Yuasa’s brain splattered onto the screen in all its goopy glory. Audiences will begin to grasp what they are in for early on as loser Nishi, too wimpy to try to save his childhood sweetheart from gangsters, is shot in the butt by a soccer-playing psychopath, projecting Nishi into the afterlife. In this limbo, God – shown as a series of rapidly changing characters – tells him to walk toward the light. But Nishi runs like hell in the other direction and returns to Earth a changed man, driven to live each moment to the fullest.
ABOUT MASAAKI YUASA
After graduating from Kyushu Sangyo University majoring in Fine Arts, he joined Ajia-do (an animation studio in Tokyo) and became a key animator for the anime TV show Chibi Maruko-chan. After becoming freelance, he did the background set design and key animation for the Crayon Shin-chan movies. He also wrote the script for his first directorial work, the 2004 title Mind Game, which won the Animation Division Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival put on by the Agency for Cultural Affairs Japan, and was praised as one of the Top 100 animated films of all time by a jury of critics, filmmakers and animation historians in Time Out New York. He would go on to direct his first original TV anime, Kemonozume (2006) as well as the 2010 feature The Tatami Galaxy, based off a book by Tomihiko Morimi, both of which won many awards.
In 2014, he also directed, wrote the script, and did storyboarding for Food Chain, an episode of the popular American TV series Adventure Time. The episode earned him an Annie Award nomination for Best Director of a TV episode. Lu Over the Wall (2017), his latest feature, won the grand prize Cristal for a Feature Film at Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the most prestigious international festival for animation, and was also an official selection at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. It will be released in theaters by GKIDS in late spring 2018.
ABOUT GKIDS
GKIDS is a producer and distributor of award-winning feature animation for both adult and family audiences. Since 2010, the company has scored an astounding ten Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations with The Secret of Kells in 2010, A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita in 2012, Ernest & Celestine in 2014, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya and Song of the Sea in 2015, Boy and theWorld and When Marnie Was There in 2016, My Life as a Zucchini in 2017 and most recently, The Breadwinner for this year’s Oscars. GKIDS also handles North American distribution for the famed Studio Ghibli library of films, one of the world’s most coveted animation collections with titles Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke and others.
GKIDS recently launched ANIMATION IS FILM, an annual LA-based film festival. The first edition took place October 20-22 at the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood for a sold-out audience of 5,000. ANIMATION IS FILM embraces the highest aspirations of animation as a cinematic art form and is a vocal advocate for filmmakers who push the boundaries of their work to the fullest range of expression that the medium is capable of.
