Japan's Mamoru Oshii is clearly one of a small handful of animators worldwide who truly deserve the auteur label. Always technically brilliant his films often avoid typical, linear narration, opting instead for metaphysical wanderings into his constantly repeated pet issues: the dehumanizing nature of technology, the basic essence of humanity, and - most of all - his love for his basset hound. Hounds are simply everywhere in Oshii's work and he lavishes a degree of attention on them that he often denies his human characters. The man is a dog nut.
Given his leanings towards metaphysics Open Your Mind is an ideal project for Oshii. Comissioned as an all encompassing media project - an exhibition hall was built that would totally immerse patrons in the experience - Open Your Mind gives Oshii the opportunity to address all his pet issues directly without needing to dress it up in narrative at all. It allows him to handle his themes directly. It is typically brilliant and, with the exception of one surprisingly poorly rendered piece of CG, technically astounding.
What follows will involve a lot of summarizing of images. Since this project involves no narrative whatsoever I don't really consider any of this spoiler territory, but some may disagree ... keep that in mind if you proceed ...
The film opens with a sequence that employs many of the same techniques as Oshii's VR masterpiece Avalon, but he's refined the technique here to such a degree that it could make the Avalon characters blush at how comparatively ugly they are. If you've seen Avalon you know that they have absolutely nothing to blush about because that film is itself a feast of eye candy - if you haven't seen it, shame on you - but this sequence stands above the best visual moments of Oshii's earlier work. The camera moves through a forest before coming upon a trio of figures clearly intended to evoke Egyptian gods, human figures dressed in robes and armor with the heads of a fish, a bird and - of course - a dog. The trio stand for the fusion of nature and technology in the three different areas of life here on earth - water, air and land - and Oshii takes us through each area in sequence.
After the forest prologue the film breaks into three sections, one devoted to each of the forest avatars. The first is Sho-Ho, the water segment. Driven by a chanted soundtrack that gives an obvious nod to Oshii's Innocence this segment builds a link between the undersea world and outer space, equating schools of fish with galaxies of stars, the camera moving freely through this strange undersea world before eventually settling into what appears to be a boneyard.
This moves us to Hyakkin, the second segment, this one devoted to the air and the most technically accomplished of the three. The camera begins skimming over the water before it launches into the sky and Oshii introduces another familiar element: a computerized heads up display, a technological interface overlayed on top of nature, observing and analyzing everything it moves through. A flock of birds is broken down into a series of computer symbols. The clear skies become darker, grey, as we move into a cityscape. The mood becomes much darker and more aggressive both in the visuals and the soundtrack. The pollution is obvious, the buildings a mix of chemical refineries and military ships. As you progress through the blasted cityscape the patterns of buildings become familiar until you realize that you are looking at the boneyard of the previous segment ...
You then move to Ku-Nu, the final sequence, this one devoted to land based life. A cloud of falling leaves clears to reveal some sort of basset hound / centaur - the one piece of poor CG mentioned earlier - before moving into another sequence of falling computer glyphs - a sequence Oshii fans will recognize as one the Wachowski's stole from Ghost in the Shell for The Matrix - before settling on a broken DNA helix. Some new code fills the gap in the helix and the camera moves to an ultrasound image of human / animal morphing. The implication is clear, that we are essentially the same and reliant upon each other.
The camera then moves back to the starting forest and closes with a shot of a multi-armed Hindu inspired tech goddess.
The film reel itself runs for only a half hour but there is a wealth of information carried within it, a host of Oshii's pet images and issues revisited. Though it will clearly not have the same immersive effect on DVD as it would in the actual installation it is still a very impressive piece of work. The second disc of the set includes an exhaustive set of estras - including a lengthy making of that takes you from the building of the hall through to the final exhibit - but, unfortunately, none include english subtitles. Sound and video quality are both excellent.