Serdar | Genji Press

If Kurosawa made samurai cinema for Japan and the rest of the world to boot, Rônin-gai is the kind of samurai cinema that the Japanese made exclusively for themselves: gritty, violent, and unapologetic, but also keen on character and insight. It harkens back to the grittier rough’n’tumble samurai cinema of the Sixties and Seventies, very much the antithesis of Kurosawa’s more polished morality tales. Such films were designed to bring in audiences and cater to their love of swordplay, heroic struggle and bloodshed, and not to spark larger questions the meanings of such things. What’s interesting about Rônin-gai is that it comments on its own material as much as it savors it.

In Man against Myth, philosopher Barrows Dunham explained that one of the problems with tyranny is that you have no choice but to be a tyrant. If you want all the goodies that go with being a conqueror, you have to actually do the conquering, and the damage done to you as a person is irreversible and permanent. “The gains hardly seem worth the degeneracy,” he wrote, and he could have been talking about anyone from Mussolini (who inspired a good deal of the essay in question) to the warlords of ancient Japan.

Samurai Banners asks almost exactly the same question: What is the point of trying to become a “great man”, whether a conqueror or a uniter, if the cost involved is so great to you that there’s not much left to be called great? It deals with a chapter out of Japan’s own feudal history, when a number of different warlords were battling each other fiercely to control all of Japan; the rhetoric each of them used for this was that by ruling Japan under one banner, they could have peace. Yes, and in fact they were able to have that under the Tokugawa from the 1600s on, but there’s no small irony in that they had to kill so many of themselves (and each other) to get there.

I will have a hard time describing Mind Game without collapsing into blathering fandom. It is certainly one of the greatest animated films I’ve ever seen — it tells a story that is life-affirming and inspiring, and uses animation in an absolutely unparalleled way to do it. It’s cosmic, comic, manic, slapstick and tragic — sometimes all at once — and never stumbles even as it dances from one feeling to the next. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously described a film as a “feel-good experience,” but Mind Game earns the label. It rejuvenated me.

Many people do not seem to be interested in animated films that aren’t by Disney, Pixar or Dreamworks. They think of animation as a genre, not a mode of expression, which is a mistake. Animation lets you do things that aren’t possible in live action — not simply physically, which is obvious enough, but also in terms of what kinds of feelings and reactions you can evoke from the audience. Mind Game wants to do exactly that, and in a way that’s full of real wonder and joy. People who make a steady diet of glum, ironic entertainment will probably hate it — but if they do, I pity them. They’re missing out.