A BLAST FROM THE PAST: Requiem for a Dream
The films of Satoshi Kon bring the depths of the subconscious into bright anime light by Tom Mes from the March/April 2007 issue of Film Comment
Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination June 27 – July 1 at the Walter Reade Theater: the vanguard Japanese animator joins us for an in-depth look at his unique brand of fantasy and arresting imagery.
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 wealth 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, with good reason, is sometimes referred to as the 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 part-time 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 this device is stolen and used to mentally incapacitate the research team, her descents into the maelstrom of the mind become an investigation in which she is aided by a traumatized detective suffering from a tenacious recurring nightmare.
It will come as no surprise that dream and waking life soon start to merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable. What is surprising, though, is that the borders that cordon off such domains as the Internet and the cinema also fade away. And it’s not just borders that disappear but also definitions. For much of Paprika’s running time, any environment that can be drawn and seen is real. Or unreal.
This marks out Kon as a man with a keen awareness of his medium. Like Hayao Miyazaki, who has a comparable penchant for flights of fancy, Kon regards himself first and foremost as “a man who draws pictures.” But the modesty of this statement is deceptive in an era when the increasing technological complexity of animation can seem little more than a veil for a new form of complacency. With a few honorable exceptions, Hollywood’s hegemony over the field of digital animation has given rise to an assembly-line mentality, with a new CGI cartoon rolling off the conveyor belt every other month, indistinguishable from its predecessors, cast from the same mold of synthetic animals/dolls/cars speaking in celebrity voices and embarking upon quest scenarios.
Back in 2001, Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within shattered a lot of utopian dreams of an all-digital cinema, when its soulless protagonists found themselves displaying their superhuman prowess to empty theaters. Perhaps the current complacency is a direct result of that film’s failure; mainstream digital animators lost their main raison d’être, that of conquering cinema as a whole by way of the closest possible imitation of reality. Having found no new goals, their ambition now seems reduced to tweaking a hair here and a fingernail there.
In sharp contrast stands the man who draws pictures. Kon doesn’t bother to imitate reality not only because whatever he creates will be instantly recognizable as a drawing but also because to do so would only limit his options. Better yet, it’s the very unreality of drawings that attracts many Japanese animators in the first place. Whereas films like Osamu Dezaki’s Golgo 13: The Professional (83) and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (88) flaunted the novelty of digital animation, the efforts of many of today’s artists to integrate CGI even go so far as to camouflage it as hand-drawn cel animation, as in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.
In Kon’s animated work, escape from the clutches of reality is central. His early career as a manga artist paved the way for a role as background artist on Patlabor 2 (93) and Roujin Z (91), projects supervised by Mamoru Oshii and Katsuhiro Otomo respectively. Under Otomo’s wing he served in the same capacity on the omnibus film Memories (95), on which he also made his debut as a scriptwriter with a chapter, “Magnetic Rose,” that is almost a blueprint for his later obsessions. Here, a team of space scavengers encounter a gigantic, rose-shaped piece of metal and discover its interior to be an ornate opera house. What they have in fact entered is the floating tomb of a long-dead soprano named Eva, whose ghostly presence soon conjures up holographic reenactments of fragments from her life, both on and off stage, in which the astronauts are forced to participate.
The original Japanese title of “Magnetic Rose” (“Kanojo no Omoide”) translates as “Her Memories,” and despite its prosaic ring, this succinctly summarizes the entirety of Kon’s oeuvre. Memories, like dreams, become directly accessible environments for his protagonists to explore and get lost and found in. The deep-space salvage workers of “Magnetic Rose” are reincarnated as the movie geeks in Kon’s very similarly plotted Millennium Actress (03), in which a reclusive, aging film star recounts her life for the benefit of their video camera, her reminiscences taking the form of prize moments from the history of Japanese cinema. Her two interviewers imagine themselves as battling samurai in an epic period piece, or as control-room engineers in a Sixties sci-fi adventure. Life onscreen and off intermingle; memory, phantasm, and wish fulfillment become cinema.
In Perfect Blue (98), movies already serve as the catalyst for an increasingly confused reality, as pop starlet Mima gives in to pressure from her management and agrees to shoot a salacious rape scene for a TV mystery series. Here Kon takes hallucination and psychosis as his realm of the unreal, complemented by the Internet. Mima loses control of her destiny and subsequently her mind by allowing the dreams and aspirations of others to supplant her own. Before long, she has become the person she is perceived to be by those around her—her agent, her overbearing chaperone, the stalker who seems to know all the minutiae of her comings and goings and reports them on his website. In Mima’s tiny apartment, where the only links to her former reality are her regionally accented phone calls to her family back home, she slowly succumbs to schizophrenia. Mima’s cutesy pop-idol persona becomes an autonomous entity that starts to haunt her—knife in hand, ready to end all the confusion.
This intermingling of daily life with dream, memory, hallucination, psychosis, cinema, and the Internet reaches new heights in Paprika, in which the distinction between real and imagined is completely erased. Even in the film’s early scenes, when we are supposedly still in the real world, Kon matter-of-factly throws in the physically improbable: the inventor of the dream recorder is so tall and obese that he gets stuck inside an elevator like Winnie the Pooh after a few too many pots of honey.
Cinema and the Net are alternative portals into dreams. As in Perfect Blue, a website seems to hold the key to unraveling the mystery but only provokes another hallucination. The detective in charge of investigating the theft of the dream recorder suffers from cinephobia; his nightmares take the shape of a headlong montage of fragments from classic films, in each of which he plays the lead. An empty cinema functions as a temporary safe haven, where dreams are projected on the silver screen. Adorned with Akira Kurosawa’s trademark cap and shades, the cop explains filmmaking’s 180-degree rule in a futile attempt to hold on to a vestige of normality: “Never cross the imaginary line!”
However, like a recursive picture effect, the womb-like safety of the movie theater disappears and the dreams refuse to be confined to the screen—in both Paprika and the theater in which its viewers sit. Once Atsuko has entered someone’s dream, Kon shifts gears and bombards us with images that teem with tiny details, as in the aforementioned unruly serpentine procession, which travels from dream to dream, coming down off the screen, into the theater, and intruding into what we assumed was reality just a minute earlier. The result is something unprecedented in Kon’s films, a kind of fever-dream state shared by characters and viewers alike. While we remained passive spectators in the director’s earlier work, Paprika’s explosions of blue butterflies and parading paraphernalia send us hurtling helplessly into his ever more sophisticated animated universe.
Tom Mes runs the Japanese film website MidnightEye and is the author of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto, and, with Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film.
