Paprika

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