You can’t escape anime. These Japanese cartoons are in every video store, comic book shop, and Borders in America. Saturday morning cartoons are mostly anime, and anime clogs the Cartoon Network. Everyone has an opinion about anime, but most folks older than 25 haven’t watched much of it. The Museum of Modern Art now seeks to rectify this with their three-month overview of the field called, logically, “Anime!!”

Anime partially earns its lousy reputation in the way it panders to adolescent male power fantasies, and this series is fully stocked with the worst offenders: giant robots. There’s “Gigantor” (August 28 & 31), the original giant robot series, and an episode of the influential sci-fi soap opera “Mobile Suit Gundam”(August 28 & 31) that debuted in 1979. But anime is a hungry, flexible format that constantly retools past ideas into bizarre new forms.

The giant robot got irradiated with apocalyptic hysteria in “Neon Genesis Evangelion” from Studio Gainax, which inspires a cultish devotion from its fans. In this “Chariots of the Gods” fever dream, humans build giant, fighting robots called, appropriately enough, EVAs, out of the corpse of the biblical Adam. Piloted by a bunch of head cases, the EVAs protect Earth from angels out to forcibly evolve humanity.

You can see the final chapters of this whacked series, “Evangelion: End of Evangelion,” on August 26 & 29, complete with a Space Jesus crucified in a government lab, gargantuan angels decapitated in billion-gallon gouts of blood, and the Kabbalah.

On the other end of the spectrum are the domestic comedies, like “Ranma 1/2” (July 11 & 17 and August 27) from Rumiko Takahashi. A hugely popular manga artist and one of the richest women in Japan, Ms. Takahashi mixes up bubbly cocktails of surrealism, fantasy, and farce.

Ranma, a young martial artist, has been cursed. She turns into a woman when doused with cold water and a man when doused with hot. With a supporting cast that includes a taciturn panda and an angry pig, Ms. Takahashi wrangles infinite, lunatic plotlines out of her characters’ unrequited crushes, hair-brained schemes, and enormous egos.

The two strains of the anime gene pool recombine wildly in “FLCL” (pronounced “Fooly Cooly,” and screening August 28 & 31), a “Twin Peaks” take on small-town Japanese life from the twisted geniuses at Studio Gainax. Naota lives in a boring burg dominated by the mysterious Medical Mechanica corporation. When he gets whacked in the head by an alien woman riding a Vespa, he sprouts an embarrassing horn which eventually hatches two giant robots. Then things get seriously weird.

But even “FLCL” is just a warm-up for the transcendent “Mind Game” (September 2), one of the best animated movies ever made. Unlike most of the movies in this series, “Mind Game” was created for the big screen rather than for television. It is a filthy, funny, and inexpressibly moving joy ride, which starts on a subway and ends in the belly of a whale. The plot sparks when a young loser named Nishi bumps into his old high school sweetheart, who’s getting married. They go out to get a bite to eat, violence erupts, and Nishi winds up dying and going to heaven, where he mixes it up with a bizarre version of God before coming back to life. It deservedly beat Hayao Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle” for Japan’s top animation award in 2004.

Anime can be cheap, shoddy, and juvenile, but movies like “Mind Game,” “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” and “FLCL” prove it can also be great.

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