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THE FILMS OF SATOSHI KON BRING THE DEPTHS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS INTO BRIGHT ANIME LIGHT BY TOM MES
THROUGH THE HEART OF SATOSHI KON'S Paprika runs an otherworldly parade-toys, dolls, and assorted ephemera, chairs, tables, and other supposedly inanimate objects, all mixed into a writhing, twitching, bouncing, singing cavalcade that is dizzying in its wealdi of detail. First seen crossing a desert dreamscape, this imaginary procession makes its way through forests and over bridges to spill out into what looks suspiciously like our day-to-day urban environment.
Reality is a relative term in the context of animation, and in Paprika, as in most of his previous films, Kon eagerly embraces its polar opposite. His new film is an adaptation of the 1993 novel of the same name by Yasutaka Tsutsui, an author who, widi good reason, is sometimes referred to as die Japanese Philip K. Dick. Dickian mindwarps abound in Tsutsui's prose, as titles like 4.8 Billion Delusions and My Blood Is the Blood of Another suggest. The novelist and parttime actor (in Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini and Shinji Aoyama's Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachtani?, among others) is famous as much for his eccentric behavior as for his books: during the Nineties he went on strike, producing no new work for several years to protest the Japanese publishing world's lack of guts and ambition.
Kon shares Tsutsui's affinity for the unreal and the irrational. And while the director had been nursing an ambition to adapt Paprika since finishing his directorial debut Perfect Blue in 1997, the author likewise envisioned Kon as the man best suited for the job of bringing his novel to the screen. Their paths finally crossed in 2003, when a magazine commissioned Kon to interview the novelist. The deal was made on the spot.
It's not hard to see what attracted the animator to Paprika: in its fusion of dream and waking life, real and unreal, it is prime Kon material. Its protagonist, a female research scientist named Atsuko, glides in and out of other people's dreams, where she assumes the shape of a spunky alter ego named Paprika. Her invasions serve a scientific purpose at first, aiding the development of an apparatus that allows the recording of dreams. But when a prototype of...