Dash Of Paprika For Flavor

If there’s one trailer you watch all year…

I am tremendously psyched for Satoshi Kon’s new movie Paprika. He’s proven himself to be one of the most exciting filmmakers today, I think, pushing animation to new levels. As hard as it was to watch Paranoia Agent, there’s no doubt it was a sophisticated and sharp drama that Adult Swim had guts to show (it wouldn’t be out of place as an HBO series, really). Paprika looks like Kon messing with reality and identity again, with a psychotherapist taking her alter-ego, Paprika, to dive inside the consciousnesses of troubled people to find their problems. It’s like a better, respectable, and far less skeezy The Cell! ^[1]

And he’s brilliant at exploring the thin line between reality and fantasy. Fantasies of all kinds end up being mixed in with the “real” world, sometimes overtaking it completely. Millennium Actress had an actress use the power of cinema to use her films tell her life story (the sequence where she runs through all her roles in all the worlds of her movies is one of my all time favorites in film). Paranoia Agent was a scathing social commentary that blended a number of fantasies to criticize society’s inability to take personal responsibility. The fantasies of mass and paranoid delusions; the fantasies of corporate culture (through the Maromi cult, the otaku, the hellish animation studio); the fantasies of a nostalgic past (the disillusioned police chief, at one point, finds himself lost in a cardboard cutout world of the good ol’ days); and the fantasies of the self, created by identity. Which another theme Kon is using again, the duality in an individual’s identity (Perfect Blue was centered around that; Paranoia Agent’s Harumi Chono suffered from multiple personality disorder with two extremely opposite identities crying out for a middle-ground synthesis; now Paprika’s psychotherapist and her alter-ego).

I really can’t wait to see how Kon will portray the subconscious, with Paprika diving in to address people’s neuroses and issues. The glimpses in the trailer look outstanding, with Paprika being able to take different forms (interestingly, mythologically based: the fairy, the mermaid, the sphinx, and Son Goku). And there’s another infectious Susumu Hirasawa song to get stuck in your head, too.

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[1.](I do like that movie, if really only for the surreal dream parts. But sheesh, are the serial killer parts distasteful and ham-fisted. Paprika seems like it will handle the premise far better and more artfully.) –^