Perfect Blue (1997)

 

Director: Satoshi Kon

Screenplay: Sadayuki Murai

Based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi

(Voice) Cast: Junko Iwao as Mima Kirigoe; Rica Matsumoto as Rumi; Emi Shinohara as Eri Ochiai; Emiko Furukawa as Yukiko; Hideyuki Hori as Sakuragi; Masashi Ebara as Murano; Shiho Niiyama as Rei; Shinichiro Miki as Taku; Shinpachi Tsuji as Tadokoro; Tohru Furusawa as Yatazaki; Yoku Shioya as Shibuya; Yousuke Akimoto as Tejima

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #197

 

The following review is to be found on my other blog 1000 Anime as well. If this is of interest to you the reader, follow the link HERE for many more reviews.

 

Who are you?

Once seen, a long time ago, Perfect Blue has stayed with me for a long time. The irony is that, in another context, this plot would have become a lurid and dumb thriller, as clichéd as the one in the television show, Double Bind, that lead Mima Kirigoe transitions to from an idol singer to an up-and-coming actress from her idol group Cham. Alongside the fact Satoshi Kon was a one-off, this also became an animated production, the tone and rules changed alongside the people behind the theatrical film taking the best route forwards to make a great film from such material. The irony is that this production was meant to be live action, adapting Yoshikazu Takeuchi's source material, only for the 1995 Kobe earthquake to prevent that version and an alternative animated version from Madhouse studios to be created on a lower budget. It says the final film's advantage that, even with a 2002 live action existing, this Kon helmed version is the definitive adaptation to many.

Returning to Perfect Blue, this film's deconstructive nature immediately begins with a live tokusatsu performance beginning the film as a cold opening. These are a cultural detail, especially with knowledge of this film getting such notice in the West it even inspired American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, that I have seen in many anime but are very idiosyncratic and likely to be ignored without batting an eyelid, where actors dress as Power Ranger-like heroes or monstrous villains to entertain kids at theme parks or at least outside, two stating how disappointing this looked to the original television show. Cham are introduced, a three woman idol singing group who are struggling to find success, and the film intercuts the performance with the banality of our lead Mima away from work buying groceries.

Satoshi Kon, who tragically died at too early an age at only forty six, due to pancreatic cancer, would build a reputation as a director, baring Tokyo Godfathers (2003), of stories breaking down reality, exploring psychological states and even dreams. This is where, literalised, Perfect Blue takes a new level as a suspense thriller, where Mima is transitioned by her agency to become an actress, with a stalker soon to murder people "debasing" her. Throughout there is a meta tone, as when we are on the TV show Double Bind, where she is a secondary character on, there are scenes being acted out and also behind-the-scenes ones of the cast breaking character. Mima, as she fears a doppelganger of her exists, is also beholden to her old self to obsessive fans despite trying to grow as a person.

All the fans of the idol group with their own versions of Mima are seen, including the sinister Me-Mania, an obsessive fan connected to the doppelganger. I could not help but think of how much of the film now is tackling gender politics, as this film is structured around a fragmentation between an idealised version of Mima as the Cham idol singer, the star of a lurid TV show and who poses in nude photographs, and Mima Kirigoe herself, a twenty or so year old woman not from the metropolis, wandering along in this career of hers as work, who is neither. The idol singer is another cultural aspect from Japan that is distinct. It is in itself not a squeaky clean industry, but it is also prominent how strict some of the rules imposed on female idol singers can be, some including not even allowing their stars to date, to impose an idealised image for fandom without scandal.  

Mima, as she fears a doppelganger dressed in her old Cham costume haunts her, is beholden to her old self to obsessive fans. All the fans have their own versions of her as mentioned which we see, Kon himself tackling this subject of obsession in a negative light, from this to nostalgia, throughout his career, but in this particular case there is an added poignancy of following a young woman having to step out of her squeaky clean persona, an innocent who sings twee love songs only to now become a fully formed human being, who lives in a tiny apartment and has a regular life. Even though this was based on a novel by a man, and directed by a man, bearing in mind the animators and production team too, there was on this viewing a lot which stood out in terms of gender politics, a strikingly poignant line in particularly, when confronted by her doppelganger, when the other mocks her with the equivalent of "nobody likes idols with tarnished reputations".

But the other side is not glamorous either. Probably one of the darkest theatrical anime made, it has one of the most uncomfortable but morally well executed rape scenes in either live action or animation, involving one Mima acts out on the Double Blind TV show as her character turns to stripping only to be mobbed by the male pundits. It includes the behind-the-scenes of everyone breaking character, the main rapist just an actor asking between takes if she is okay, yet the scene is still uncomfortable with emotional aftershocks for her, acted out in the shooting of the film in full with complete intensity to the content. Now there is a new edge that, in the machinations, there is an added creepiness of the screenwriter writing a scene for an ex-idol, as spoken in the dialogue in regards to her agency wanting more of a role for her, to shed her innocence. Even that it leads to her character developing a multiple personality and being revealed to be the killer of women feels more like a lurid shock to get TV viewers on this viewing, Mima having to put up with this to become a great actor as she goes along.

Outside of notoriously lurid anime like Urotsukidôji or others with dangle precariously (or fall into) the same ball park, Perfect Blue is a dark and intense production in terms of adult content but without stepping over into trashiness. With industrial synth and eerie group vocals adding to the mood, by Masahiro Ikumi before Kon found his frequent collaborator Susumu Hirasawa, Perfect Blue does quality as a thriller but is definitely of the horror genre in mood and content. Even the one dated aspect, from a time when the internet was new and had weird terminology like "URLs", is still uncomfortably relevant about false personas, a false autobiographical diary of Mima's life she finds online scaring her, starting her psychological breakdown, because of how it even knows accurately what foot she steps off a subway train with first.

It is a bloody film, probably the most intense in Kon's career thought his work could be very adult, even over Paranoia Agent (2004) which did not shy away from subjects like suicide, but there is a tone and details here that in the modern day would startle even the world of uncut fan pleasing anime with erotic content. Some of it is unexpectedly subversive, such as how most of the victims in a series of murders are male characters. Some of it is the intensity of scenes of violence in general. One such thing is that, with Mima's nude photo shoot, you have depiction of female pubic hair. In Japanese culture, I have seen male and female genitals blurred in art, and even Japanese pornography is censored for depictions, and whether Perfect Blue was an exception in its home land or not, it would have a greater shock for a viewer (even Western fans outside of uncensored hentai) to see. One scene, where a male victim is stabbed to death with a phallic weapon of a screwdriver, even goes as far as have cuts to the nude photo shot mid-stab, and projected on the television in the background of the murder, intercutting an eroticised female body to a man being penetrated violently with a weapon.

Where Perfect Blue fully hits its stride is when all reality breaks down, starting with little tricks, such as seeing police sirens in the next scene but only to pull back to see a child riding a toy ride-on vehicle. With very realistic character designs, even having a playful touch of cutting to an exaggerated stereotype of a female anime character in one scene, a toy model with comically big eyes up against the camera, you could wonder why this could not be in live action aside from the fact that Kon's film is completely plastic in its ability to distort reality as a result. Literalising psychological states, contrasting the real Mima with a Cham idol Mima whose skin even glows and looks unreal, and with far more preciseness get away with the "it was all a dream" twists by television plotting invading her real life and bending reality. Double Blind scenes blur to psychological analysis Mima herself with obvious ideas, clichés from a trite TV show coming more meaningful when she herself is scrutinised. This became Kon's trademark, a willingness to bend his worlds to scrutinise its characters.

[Major Spoiler Warnings] You can argue this uses broad caricature. The culprit is actually Rumi, an older larger woman, and Me-Mania looks completely alien, but Perfect Blue is thankfully still more complicated than this. This is a very simple plot, with resolution, a clear conclusion where Mima even states in the last shot and line she has found herself, but the execution completely succeeds in adding weight...especially when the final scene I have mentioned, in the Japanese dub, has a play with which voice actor says the final line for added distortion of what is real. [Spoilers End]

Returning to Perfect Blue, it is still a success. It did not come from an abrupt spark of genius mind. Kon worked his way up as an animator, as well as in writing screenplays, and this was created by Madhouse, so this was a collaborative effort where everyone was on fire creating with. The great thing is that, making a lasting impression when Manga Entertainment acquired the licence, Perfect Blue is still held aloft, not an obscurity, and that Satoshi Kon in his brief career never dropped the ball after this initial promise.

Paprika (2006)

From https://i.jeded.com/i/paprika.18991.jpg

Director: Satoshi Kon

Screenplay: Seishi Minakam and Satoshi Kon

(Voice) Cast: Megumi Hayashibara (as Doctor Atsuko Chiba/Paprika); Tōru Furuya (as Doctor Kōsaku Tokita); Tōru Emori (as Doctor Seijirō Inui); Katsunosuke Hori (as Doctor Toratarō Shima); Akio Ōtsuka (as Detective Toshimi Konakawa); Kōichi Yamadera (as Doctor Morio Osanai)

A 1000 Anime Crossover

Synopsis: In an alternative Japan, a piece of newly created technology called the DC Mini is created that allows people to enter dreams of other people and recorded them for psychoanalytical purposes. However when the three prototypes are stolen, a series of events start to take place where a dream of madness, represented by giant parade, starts to infect people and leave them in a delirious state that will leave them a hollow shell or unable to protect themselves. Alongside the inventor of the DC Mini, a child in a giant of a man's body called Dr. Kōsaku Tokita (Furuya) and a detective called Toshimi Konakawa (Ōtsuka) stuck on a case which has affected his dreams, a female psychiatrist called Dr. Atsuko Chiba (Hayashibara) is on the path to stop this, her secret persona that of a free spirited nymph of dreams called Paprika who acts like a separate representation of her subconscious.

The passing of director/animator Satoshi Kon at 46 to pancreatic cancer in 2010 was one of the saddest tragedies of anime in the last decade or so. Great and potentially innovative creators with idiosyncratic personalities are thankfully contributing to the anime industry, but Kon existed as one of the most distinct auteurs of it who'd always create something that felt like an event. He was one of the few like Hayao Miyazaki to reach a wider audience outside of anime fandom, and with only four feature films, one short and one thirteen episode television series in his career, alongside staff work as an animator and a writer, and a career before as a manga author, I'd argue he had the perfect career where every film and the sole series is distinct and important to him as an anime creator. Paprika for me  was the one work in his career that felt lesser than the others despite its virtues, unfair considering that his other feature films were Perfect Blue (1997), Millennium Actress (2001) and Tokyo Godfather (2003) but with a lot of expectations after them to follow that effected it. Revisiting it any flaws with what was sadly his last completed production, I can stricken those original concerns of mine away.

From http://66.media.tumblr.com/4444b9bd572202a258478fd599f16587/
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Baring Tokyo Godfather, his most conventional film in tone, Kon's most distinct trademark alongside his realistic character designs is his unique take on dream logic. The fluidity of animation allows for dream logic to mesh greatly, but Kon took it to an aesthetic extreme with his own high quality style. The concept of reality and various forms of unreality exist in other anime as a common theme but Kon in his various takes on it - psychosis, cinema, dreams - viewed the border as being exceptionally thin even next to other anime narratives. Paprika's is more blatant, the absurdity of dreams being taken to its farthest based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui of the same name. In a simple conspiracy plot, one that is dense in exposition but simple in presentation, the film dives head first into some of the most absurd and strange imagery possible for a film on the subject helped further by the fact of it being animated, of a giant parade that infects minds and turns victims' minds to jelly, led by a frog orchestra and marching through anything in its way with so much detail within it that the production would have to use digitally assisted animation because animating it by hand would be impossible.

The film's pleasures exist within being a spectacle unlike some of the director's other work but Kon's characterisations of his films' casts is another great aspect of his work and as strong here. His characters are always interesting, sacrificing the big eyed schoolgirls of other anime in favour of adult men and women who are very realistically depicted even when slapstick is at play in scenes. Philosophical ideas still permeate this film too, in this case through a laid back attitude discussing the ideas of dreams even in the context of a sci-fi action narrative with a potential apocalyptic ending.  None of this ever comes off as navel gazing both because of how alive the film is visually and in plotting, and how the characters are dynamic as they are, even two virtual bartenders for a website (voiced by Satoshi Kon himself and co-screenwriter Seishi Minakam) who exist in a blur of the web and dreams and talk of intellectual ideas in an almost deadpan way to anyone who visits their site.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uQomVnBkydc/maxresdefault.jpg

It's strange however with these virtues in mind that there is one flaw and it's a peculiar, unexpected one - that the villains are possibly all gay with hints made to the fact throughout - one far from a sad homophobic streak but something exceptionally weird in Kon's filmography. It's expectionally weird considering he was very open to ideas sexuality throughout his career including making on the protagonists of Tokyo Godfathers a transvestite. If anything it feels now like a badly fleshed out idea, likely meant to deal with ideas of desire which are subconscious to a lot of Paprika's take on dreams but no way as properly dealt with as it should've, more so as while it's all vague there are plenty of allusions to sexual desire throughout the film that are both honest but also dark, particularly for the later with a character called Dr. Morio Osanai (Yamadera) whose love for Atsuko Chiba becomes more disturbing and leads to one of the most adult scenes in the whole film. There is the likelihood, considering Kon was never black and white in his ideas throughout his work, that there's more complexity to this idea but the abruptness of it does stand out like a bad taste in the film that's above it and smarter everywhere else. Even if it's in the background, sexuality and gender is throughout the film, especially as the ending has a yin yang conflict between the feminine and the masculine to settle the strife, making this one flaw more obvious, more a problem as it spoils a perfect slate in Kon's filmography and goes against a film in Paprika which is as stunning and far more three dimensional to even its villains everywhere else as it is anyway.

From http://www.myfilmviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/apapr2.jpg

Technical Detail:

Paprika is a technical achievement, a testament in how whether hand drawn or animated with assistance with computers you can create lush, imaginative dreamscapes. Of importance is not to downplay the work of the production staff for Kon's projects, all of his work produced by the animation studio Mad House whose high benchmark in quality is matched by having continually produced the work of auteur anime directors like Kon or Yoshiaki Kawajiri in their studio. The results in Paprika are suitably spectacular for a studio, amongst the various teams that would be involved to animate each frame of the film, known for some of the best productions on a technical side.

The other factor of great importance is the music of Susumu Hirasawa which, in honesty, is the best thing about Paprika even above everything else. With the help of the film's wide release and the soundtrack being available as an album, the eerie and beautiful synth songs of musician/composer Hirasawa could be appreciated further and reach a wider audience. It's clear since Hirasawa started composing scores since Millennium Actress onwards that his distinct contributions have been as much a part of the director's DNA and his worlds, melding world music (especially with the vocal chanting in the dream parade's theme) with the music of the future, Paprika's score he first use Vocaloid artificial voices.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/O-QpfLV8dQw/maxresdefault.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Narratively, Paprika is very simple and straightforward. The imagery to tell it however is what stands out and makes the film as it is. Anything from a pink elephant pushing an albino alligator in a wheelchair to a chorus line of schoolgirls with camera phones for heads in a street is possible for the film. Adding to these bizarre images is Kon's trademark style of how small the membrane is between reality and this, blurring as much from the characters' psyches and memories as it is by the DC Minis in this film, where characters in Paprika can be pulled into dreams while awake and peoples' dreams mix with other peoples' dreams. Kon rather than merely bleeding the two side between each other used it to depict the mental states of the characters even if the internal had escaped into existence, the best example found in his sole TV series Paranoia Agent (2004) where an older male police detective traps himself purposely in a nostalgic world of innocent bygone days, having to be dragged out of it literally when he warms to the cure, two dimensional streets and paper toy people who are not affected by the grimness of reality.

Kon's films used this to deal with issues of identity to sexuality. The medium of cinema itself has been frequently referenced as part of a person's psyche as much as anything else that illicit emotions in his work, explicitly talked of through Konakawa's dream therapy and a huge part of the film's content. Based on a youthful passion for cinema he represses, it becomes a huge part of Konakawa's sub plot of picking himself up during a difficult case, and dealing with a deep seated regret in his past, denying that he likes films as a result despite his dreams being filled with billboard marquees for movies like Tarzan to Roman Holiday (1953) with Audrey Hepburn. The use of symbolism for each character - robots for Tokita, dolls for the elusive Kei Himuro (Daisuke Sakaguchi) who may have stolen a DC Mini for nefarious purposes etc. - is as much as adding to their characters as their dialogue and behaviour does. Everything is so well woven into the film, baring the one flaw mentioned paragraphs above, as with many Kon works that you end up picking up new details upon each viewing.

The realistic character designs Kon used throughout his career against such surreal imagery also adds to Paprika and his films' general oddness. Sometimes he would exaggerate a character design, like the exceedingly overweight but lovable Tokita, but the realism he had not only negates stereotypes of anime, gladly depicting men and women of all ages and sizes, but also provides a bridge to gauge viewers with the worlds depicted. When the films have a normalcy it means that the moment it's invaded by the unreal had a greater impact.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mindbender/Psychotronic/Surrealism/Weird

Abstract Tropes: Dreams; Dual Personalities; Dreams Against Reality; Bizarre Dialogue; Pink Elephants; Subconscious Sexuality; Subjective Reality; Too Many Tropes to Count

From http://basementrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/
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Personal Opinion:

Despite its one flaw, Paprika does ultimately become a rewarding end for Satoshi Kon's career. Sadly Kon's last project, fittingly named The Dream Machine, about two robots on a road trip, was never finished and will likely never exist beyond some images, but it's hard to deny Paprika is still a beautiful, weird and poignant career finish for someone who should still be alive and had many more ideas left in him. Aptly the last image of his last directorial work is a character going to a cinema and buying a ticket, maybe a little indulgent but for a film about dreams, from a director-writer who specialised in dreams and the subconscious through animation, it's an appropriate tip to the hat of the medium also called the dream machine he was obsessed with.