Sony
Let me begin this review by saying that It had been about 12 years since I had seen Paprika before this current watch and it was just as magical and lovely this time around as my first viewing was.
Paprika is one of my favorite anime films, firmly sitting in my top 10 anime films of all time. It is incredible. It is also the final film by animation auteur Satoshi Kon. It is astounding to me that in his short feature film career he also yielded three other nigh perfect animated films.
First he gave us the beautifully haunting, psychological thriller, Perfect Blue in 1997, then the heartbreaking and surreal story within a story drama, Millennium Actress in 2001, and his penultimate film two years later, the tragically sentimental, Tokyo Godfathers in 2003. For purely visual eye candy Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyazaki reign supreme.
The story of Paprika takes place in the near future where Paprika, the title character of this film, is the virtual construct and alter ego of Dr. Atsuko Chiba. Chiba is head of the scientific team responsible for the creation of a groundbreaking device called a “DC Mini”.
The DC Mini is a virtual reality device that allows its user to access and view other people’s dreams and nightmares, eventually allowing them to interact and possibly even control them. A wondrous device if used properly to help people decipher their dreams.
However, when the device and one of the lead scientist/developers goes missing from their cutting edge research lab, the dream world begins to bleed into the real world. Nightmares become reality. It is up to Chiba, her colleagues, and a police detective to discover what has happened and why. What follows is a surreal, insane, reality-breaking, and mind bending adventure of discovery of the truth before one man’s nightmare envelops everything. As members of her team begin to fall victim to the corrupted dream, only Paprika can save the human race from this reality destroying, waking horror.
I am not really doing this incredible film justice with that short “back of the box” description. The story has layers upon layers of themes and parallel stories all interwoven and colliding with each other as only Satoshi Kon can do.
Paprika’s visual storytelling is exceptional. I love how Kon can make the mundane horrifying and the cute unsettling. He was the master of seamlessly merging reality with the fantastical until you don’t know which you are viewing. A lot of the time it was both. He had the effortless ability to draw you into a scene that you are convinced is “the real world” and then in the blink of an eye you are seeing some incredibly complicated scene of wondrous visuals that make you question the last 10 minutes.
Paprika fills me with both wonder and awe. When I first saw it over 15 years ago I was blown away. I had seen his previous three features, Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers, all of which were just as incredible and it always saddens me that this was his last film and we will never be graced with his genius again.
Extras include commentary, featurettes, storyboards, and trailers.
Paprika is the final spice to an astounding life in animation that began in 1991 as a background designer and key animator. Based on the 1993 science fiction novel of the same name written by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Satoshi Kon adapted this because he felt that the visuals of the dream worlds described in the book could only be served properly in a visual medium like animation. He was right. This is one of the richest visual feasts you will lay eyes upon. Every time I view it again I see something new and exciting I missed before.
This film is a treat. I can not recommend this film enough to people. I really wish we could have gotten to see what his next project, Dreaming Machine, which he began production on in 2010 before succumbing to cancer would have beheld. I am kind of glad though that Madhouse has not really pursued continuing that film project as there is only one Satoshi Kon.
His unique vision would have come up with would be impossible to replicate by any other filmmaker.
