Animators have always had a thing for Surrealism, going back to Disney's "Silly Symphonies" in 1934 and beyond. (Disney, in fact, collaborated with the most notorious Surrealist of all, Salvador Dali, on 1946's fabled "Destino" project.) Japanese animators, however, are the arch Surrealists of the movie industry, and their bizarro characters and worlds make Dali look, if not tame, at least relatively sane.
Japanese animated films for the schoolage masses are more often adventure fantasies than gobs in the face of conventional realism, however. Nobita and Doraemon encounter dangers of various sorts in their travels through time and space, but dream no unquiet dreams, take no mental journeys into the Great Unknown.
Animation, though, is the ideal medium for such dreams and journeys, as Masaaki Yuasa's "Mind Game" so radically proves. Not intended for the multiplexes -- in Tokyo it is playing only at Cine Quinto in Shibuya -- it is also not the usual sci-fi entertainment for otaku.