Film Review: Paprika

Satoshi Kon is one of a tiny handful of anime directors whose every new work is immediately accepted and embraced by Western audiences–enough so that we get to see them on the big screen, anyway. After 1998’s Perfect Blue wowed festival audiences, it and follow-ups Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfaters have all received wide-ish release.

Now comes Paprika, which previously showed at the Deep Focus film fest in Columbus, and now finally returns for a regular engagement. Like Kon’s first two movies, it’s an exploration of the perception of reality through various media and states of awareness, but Paprika has a sense of fun about it that is more in line with Tokyo Godfathers. It’s definitely his sunniest and most upbeat film to date, and blast from start to finish.

It’s also his best film. While his previous work seemed to be mostly anime-for-anime’s sake (That is, they could have just as easily been told in live action), Paprkia takes advantage of that which is unique to animation (the two-dimensional design not bound by realism, the way things move from frame to frame) and exploits it as both part of the story and part of the way that story is being told.

The plot is a fairly basic one, a sort of sci-fi police procedural. In the near future, a Japanese scientist has invented technology called “The D.C. Mini,” which allows he and his fellow scientists to view, record and even enter the dreams of those using the machine.

It’s still being beta tested when the film opens, but at least two of the machines are in use outside of the controlled environments of their labs–one by a young woman named Paprika who’s using it to help patients improve their mental health, the other by a mysterious and unscrupulous bad guy that is apparently hacking into people’s dreams to do villainous stuff like take over the world or whatever.

Each of the characters is rendered in a very realistic style, all though they’re all explosively individual in design. The team of scientists, for example, includes a fantastically corpulent one, a tiny little old man with eyes that look gigantic behind four-inch-thick lenses and a pale, dark-haired beauty seemingly made out of icicles, all pointy and white. The chairman of the corporation building the machines is also pale-to-the-point of white, and tools around in an electric wheel chair, there’s a Japanese cop who looks like a more virile J. Jonah Jameson, and the title character, a red haired, Western-looking young girl who seems to have complete power in the dream world.

While the scientists investigate who’s abusing the technology, escalating skirmishes between the good guys and bad guys lead to a gigantic battle in which reality completely breaks down, with characters able to jump into posters, billboards, reflections, paintings, movie screens and TV screens as easily as walking through a door.

It’s fun, crazy, delirious stuff. Even the most hardcore otaku–who will likely have seen elements for Paprika in play in other anime– will be surprised and delighted by the execution of the story here, and even absolute anime virgins (if there are still any left in America at this point of Japanese pop culture’s ten-year-old full-scale invasion) will be won over fairly quickly by the imagery.