This ain’t your mama’s paprika. This here PAPRIKA will invade your headspace and cause fits of cool to shudder throughout your body.
Can dreams drive you crazy? Is the boundary between dream life and so-called real life permeable? Satoshi Kon has been making brilliant animations based on these and similar questions since “Perfect Blue,” his 1998 feature debut about an idol singer whose life, inner as well as outer, is invaded by an obsessed fan.
His latest and, he says, last investigation of this dream-vs.-reality theme is “Paprika,” which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival and has been selected as a possible nominee for an animation Oscar. I have no idea if his film will make it into the final five, but it is definitely different from not only the talking-animal, 3G animation for kiddies that is now standard in Hollywood, but also the manga-based, sci-fi fantasy that the Japanese animation industry exports in large quantities to the world.
True, it has SF elements, the main one being a gizmo called the DC Mini that looks like a futuristic hearing aid and can transmit the wearer’s dreams — think of an MP3 Web site that allows you to share dreams instead of tunes.
But instead of focusing on his hardware or spinning the usual good-vs.-evil SF story, Kon takes his audience on a wild, fantastic ride into a land of extreme dreaming, where primal desires and fears (absolute freedom, appropriation of one’s identity by a malevolent Other) come to gaudy, phantasmagorical life.
I know it sounds like THE CELL. But this actually has a thought behind it. I’m sure of this(sight unseen) cause director Satoshi Kon did the amazing PERFECT BLUE, the mesmerizing MILLENIUM ACTRESS, and the flat out awesome PARANOIA AGENT.
That’s 3 to 1 against CELL director Tarsem Singh.
All THE CELL did was show me J Lo smoking pot(points for the panty shot) and Vicnent D’Onofrio in weird hair. It got points for mentioning FANTASTIC PLANET but lost all off them when it turned into a 90 minute music video.
There’s a one sheet under the cut.
(via ontd and anime luving YouTube and The Japan Times)
“excuse me, who are you?”
