Anime fans know that Satoshi Kon was a visionary of film; it’s about time the rest of the world woke up to that fact. Kon passed away from cancer in 2010 at the age of 46, but he left us several extraordinary movies: Perfect Blue (1997); Millennium Actress (2002); Tokyo Godfathers (2003). Paprika, his last film, is a dazzling dream movie that seems to have inspired Inception (good as Inception may be, Paprika did it first and did it better: as we all know, the dream state falls in the realm of animation.)
The film follows a battle between an unknown “dream terrorist” who causes nightmares by stealing a device that allows others to share their dreams, the research psychologist Dr. Atsuko Chiba, and a personality named Paprika — a dream detective.
In Paprika, a gorgeous riot of future-shock ideas and brightly animated imagery, the doors of perception never close. A mind-twisting, eye-tickling wonder… If you keep your eye on the screen and don’t overworry the plot particulars, you will be rewarded with a cavalcade of charming, gently outré and beautiful hallucinations. For all its gaudy glories, the film buzzes with a sense of unease about the rapidly changing relationship between our physical selves and our machines, a topic that Mr. Kon engages with as much sophistication as writers like Neal Stephenson and Michel Houellebecq, if rather more brevity.
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Paprika expands your notion of what animation can achieve. You wake from it as if from a dream: spooked, provoked and exhilarated.
David Ansen, Newsweek
As the action gets bigger and wilder, like Alice in Wonderland on a Molotov cocktail of acid and speed, it becomes difficult to hold on to one single plotline. There are a number of simultaneous narrative streams functioning on different planes of existence (dreams, the Internet, movies). Indeed, it’s often hard to know where to rest your eyes. The sheer density of visual information is overwhelming; it’s an embarrassment of riches. But maybe that’s the idea.
Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee
Satoshi Kon
Megumi Hayashibara, Tôru Furuya, Kôichi Yamadera, Katsunosuke Hori, Tôru Emori, Akio Ôtsuka
Japan
2006
Japanese
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Credits
Screenwriter
Seishi Minakami, Satoshi Kon
Cinematography
Michiya Katô
Editor
Takeshi Seyama
Original Music
Susumu Hirasawa
Art Director
Nobutaka Ike
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Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- all great, all successful -- then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen. It's overdue rediscovery.
