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
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Screenwriter
Seishi Minakami, Satoshi Kon
Cinematography
Michiya Katô
Editor
Takeshi Seyama
Original Music
Susumu Hirasawa
Art Director
Nobutaka Ike
Also in This Series
These movies speak to our times and push the boundaries of the art form — the true modern classics we’re confident will withstand the test of time.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.
Oldboy
The second movie in Park's Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik stars as Dae Su, inexplicably held captive by he-knows-not-who for 15 years, and then, just as inexplicably, released. Not surprisingly, after all this time, he has only one thing on his mind...
Children of Men
2027: 18 years since the last baby was born, disillusioned Englishman Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country.
The Headless Woman
The pictures tell the story -- and you better not blink -- when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge.
A Serious Man
The Coen brothers' best movie is a painfully funny existentialist comedy about a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), benumbed but bewildered by his wife's announcement that she wants a divorce. That's only the start of his troubles.
Paprika
A device capable of transmitting dreams falls into the wrong hands in this dazzling anime meta-movie from visionary filmmaker Satoshi Kon. The imagery here is never less than overwhelming; it's probably the greatest scifi movie of our times.
Under the Skin
Between Birth and the death camps of Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer gave us sex, with Scarlett Johansson, picking up and disposing with interchangeable men. It's a bleakly unforgettable movie, with a mesmeric Mica Levi score.
It's Not Me
“Where are you at, Leos Carax?” To this question, the French filmmaker assembles an unpredictable essay-film made in the spirit of the late Jean-Luc Godard — an endlessly inventive self-portrait of an artist reflecting on his place in cinema history.
Holy Motors
Carax's film a dazzler, a requiem for cinema that somehow breathes new life and new hope into the form. Denis Lavant (Beau Travail) plays 11 roles and the accordion. Absurdist, surreal, poignant and unforgettable, this is truly one of a kind.
Enter the Void
Venturing where angels fear to tread, virtuoso filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Vortex) creates a dazzling journey into the Tokyo night, a mind-bending exploration of the outer reaches of human experience inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Margaret
Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.
Certain Women
Spare, incisive portraits of four Montana women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone) brushing up against the everyday wears and tears of difficult men, their own circumstances, and the desire for something better.
Moonlight
Moonlight is many things -- a portrait of a young black man coming of age in Miami in the 1980s, a film about fathers and sons, about mentorship and about the scourge of drugs -- but it is also one of the most piercing movie romances of the last decade.
Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig's first film as writer-director is a delightful, painful comedy about "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teen on the point of swapping high school for college, and her hard-working mom, Marion (Laurie Metcalf).
Silence
This sober, probing examination of faith, ego, cruelty and compassion is the most underrated film from the often under-valued latter half of Martin Scorsese's brilliant career; a passion project, about Catholic missionaries in 17th Century Japan.
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.