Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Watching Paprika, it occurred to me that there are a lot of parallels between Satoshi Kon and David Lynch. Both are concerned with the intermingling of dreams and reality, in ways that are revealing of the psychological states of their characters; both are fond of narrative techniques that mislead the audience and make you think the story's going in a different direction from where it ends up; and both made fascinating but ultimately unsuccessful television series that introduced ideas that they've refined in subsequent work. In Kon's case, that series was Paranoia Agent, a show that started out with a bang but lost its way about midway through its 13-episode run before culminating in a hysterical fit of apocalyptic madness. Paprika takes many of the basic ideas of that series, but applies a much tighter narrative focus and throws some new variations on Kon's familiar themes into the mix as well.

The plot revolves around a device called the DC Mini that allows a person to enter into another person's dream; it was developed for psychiatric treatments, but two of the unfinished prototypes are stolen and are soon put to use for mysterious, but obviously nefarious, purposes. The team that developed the DC Mini tries to track down the thief, believing that one of their own is responsible; and as the story progresses, not only do dreams and reality begin to merge, but multiple dreams come together and alter each other. And everything ultimately depends on Paprika, who is both the dream world identity of DC Mini team leader Dr. Chiba and yet not quite identical to her either.

Again like Lynch, Kon is less concerned with the mystery element of the plot than he is with the characters who are caught up in it; their personalities and relationships are the core of the film, especially the complex working and personal interactions between Dr. Chiba and Tokita, the gargantuan, childlike genius who invented the DC Mini. A police officer who's undergoing dream therapy at the start of the film becomes a crucial figure as well, and his story leads to an interesting little meditation on the similarity between the Internet and the dream world. And finally, there's Paprika herself-- a dream that is partly real, an alter ego who argues with and defies her "creator", and a conduit between the disparate universes contained within the characters' dreams. Such a figure could easily have become a mere symbol, but Kon makes her convincingly human, and when her life is seemingly threatened in a truly gruesome and unnerving scene about three-fourths of the way into the film, it's deeply upsetting even though it's all a dream.

The visual style of Paprika will be immediately familiar to anyone who's seen Kon's previous films or Paranoia Agent; his character designs look like no one else in anime (though Paprika is a little closer to the big-eyed style than usual), and Kon's love of urban environments is in evidence here again. But Paprika achieves a level of visual beauty unseen in Kon's previous work, and I don't think I've seen an anime feature film outside of Studio Ghibli's output that's this gorgeous. It's Kon's best film by a wide margin, and easily one of the best movies I've seen this year, animated or not.

Rating- 10/10