Japan, 2006
Directed by Kon Satoshi
(Animated movie)
Three scientists of a Japanese laboratory, Professor Tora-taroh Shima and his assistants Chiba Atsuko and Kohsaku Tokita, find out that their newest invention, the DC Mini, has been stolen. The DC Mini’s purpose is to record, to explore, and possibly to meddle in the dreams of people suffering from psychological problems in order to cure them. The help is provided by Paprika, the virtual creature generated by the DC Mini and acting as Atsuko’s alter ego. The urge to recover the set of three machines used by the scientists becomes even more pressing when Shima and Atsuko experience dangerous loss of reality.
One of their fellow workers is first suspected but when he commits suicide it becomes clear that something more complex and sinister is afoot. The investigation turns into a dizzying and dreadful race against time to discover who is trying to invade and manipulate dreams and what their real aim is. Already put under pressure by the president of their company, who wants their work stopped and the DC Mini destroyed, Atsuko and Shima face added urgency when Tokita falls unconscious and dreams seem to break the barrier of their owners’ minds to intrude on reality. But both get a precious help, a friend of Shima who has tested the DC Mini and befriended Paprika, Police Inspector Toshimi Kogawa.
The fourth anime by highly talented and imaginative director Kon Satoshi is firmly anchored in the techno-thriller genre, with plot and incidents revolving around sci-fi gadgetry (the story is supposed to take place six years after its shooting, in 2012). “Perfect Blue” in 1997 was already based partly on genre, a gory thriller hinging on the gruesome killings of collaborators around a J-pop star struggling to become a television star and increasingly looking like a prime suspect. High-tech also played a part in the narrative as the growing role and influence of the Internet was an essential feature of the star’s wobbling and worrisome relation with reality. But things are taken to a more elaborate level, in fact relying greatly on props and tropes that whet effortlessly the audience’s curiosity and anxiety. This is whodunit with a lot of crucial issues at stake and starring mainly scientists, while technology is unnervingly ambivalent, both a mesmerizing concept (entering the people’s minds) and a horror-provoking wild machine.
This is a departure of sort from “Perfect Blue” and “Millennium Actress” (2001). In both case, the deepest emotions of the lead characters, clearly linked to changing fortunes in their personal and professional lives, broke the walls of reality to reveal new, disturbing and radical visions, which delved far into inner feelings and an ever-living past. A vision, a memory, a gesture, a message were enough to pitch the supposedly clear narrative and enjoyably elegant narration into a fully unexpected, incredibly eerie, and yet alluring and vivid if messy world. The walls which perception and awareness protected, isolating present and fact from any illusion and distortion, moved, glided, crumbled, dissolved in a stupendous ballet that slowly challenged the audience but led to a revelation of deeper truths as well as the strength of the characters.
The style of “Paprika” is as fluid, daring, and exhilarating as these previous films. Kon, who died four years after “Paprika”’s release, had an incredible gift to segue one strand of the story into the other in the most surprising way and to drive a character smoothly but with chutzpah deeper into a series of images which had no reasons to be connected but whose abrupt self-evident collection let our rational guard off, in a fully brazen disregard for any sense of continuity and with confidence in the mojo of the suspension of disbelief.
That serves well the increasingly intricate story, as Atsuko and Shima, later joined by Kogawa, are carried away by an unwieldy chain of events, the search of the guilty one becoming unsettling, frightening and downright dangerous as dreams venture unchecked into their minds and later the real world. Their race against time is basically the fight against an ever-increasing and all-destructive power hoping to control life. Moving from one dream to another leads is a fascinating visual journey that is keen to outdo its flourishes and performances till the epic finale pitting good and evil in a half-destroyed Tôkyô that conjures up the path of destruction of Godzilla as well as the nightmarish vision of Francisco Goya.
The sacrificial victory of Paprika in her last, astonishingly poignant transformation to absorb the giant so sure of mastering dreams and reality, asserts femininity as the essential factor to bring harmony and peace. The formulaic love story concluding the scientists’ hectic and challenging journey and Atsuko’s quiet acknowledgment she has always been in love with Tokita despite his many flaws, furthers the point, with a romantic coda at the opposite of a tale highlighting men’s foolishness, selfishness and even wickedness.
However, there is a male protagonist standing apart. Kogawa is a plot unto itself that opens and closes the film – actually, the first images are those of the nightmare he often makes and upsets him so much that he volunteered to test the DC Mini and the assistance of Paprika. It revolves on a deep-seated but a little far-fetched guilt, the nagging feeling he failed his best high school friend who died young. That carves up in the meandering and thrilling plot of “Paprika” a place to ponder on the attraction and power of the cinema medium, tough in an awkward, lumbering manner.
The adventure Kogawa is thrown in enables him to understand the deeper meaning of his nightmare and to find a way to get over it, to free himself and to become a better, more confident man. It relates to the wider story in the sense that dreams are not forces to be harnessed to achieve selfish goals but images to be deciphered to get a better grasp of oneself and then fulfill a better life. More broadly, fantasies, illusions, dreams, and images should not be manipulated for any reason and out of any feelings: risks are too high and the loss too great for all of us. Better letting them to the care of the artist, to help us better understand and enjoy the world.
So, in keeping with genre rules, this anime does have a morale, where Kon’s previous productions tended to let the audience reel from the stunning montage and upending of narratives and wonder at both the process and at the ideas and feelings it has wielded and left open to serious thought. It is not irrelevant and rather suits both his worried examination of stardom and image-making in “Perfect Blue” and to a lesser extent the celebration of cinema and personal quest that underpinned “Millennium Actress”. But “Paprika” still feels like a little less inspired and provocative effort, a brilliancy that is kept within the limits of narrative constraints that tend to be more delineated and duller than in the rest of Kon’s filmography.