If you’re reading this, do me a favor and ask yourself, who are you? Now ask yourself again, who are you now, here, on this website? What do you sound like as you type on the message board? Does it sound exactly like how your co-workers hear you? If not, was it a conscious decision to alter you? And most importantly, are you sure?
Paprika is a film too hard to summarize, for two reasons. One: because it tricks you into thinking that it has a convoluted mystery plot and has lots of techno-babble. Two: because it is in all honesty does not matter. It’s a film made up of a series of beautifully visualized ideas and a plot that just keeps on moving. The best way I can describe the film is by the questions I just asked. To the casual viewer looking for an in-and-out story, Paprika sounds like a mess – something about a Dream Terrorist dicking around in people’s dreams and the dream woman named Paprika trying to stop him. The avid movie buff though, can easily catch that this is a weird, surreal, whimsical, energetic, and jolly-fun Sci-Fi story about the beauty of the film medium. Wild, huh?
The entire movie is a trampoline for insight, bouncing ideas left and right. From technology vs nature to identity crisis to Freudian dreams to the Internet as a controlled dream to the corruption of modern society. How fitting that the main character is borderline schizophrenic to tell such a schizophrenic movie. Even the tone of the film is a mish-mash of J-horror, science fiction, whodunit, police procedurals, anime action, psychological thriller, and screwball comedy. They’re all here.
But at the core of the movie, it is the idea that movies are the selected projection of our dreams. A popular question is if it’s the dream of the director or the dream of the audience. One of the plotlines in Paprika – how the Dream Terrorist is merging everyone’s dreams into one and dilutes it with reality – suggests that maybe it’s both. This movie is the director pulling our dreams into his. It’s his to create and ours to experience, just like our heroes battling the all-powerful Dream Terrorist.
In one scene, a scientist goes mad under the influence of the Dream Terrorist. He starts running down a hall to his supposed death. Director Satoshi Kon shows the scientist “shot” (this is animated, after all) from two opposing angles, like a horizontal image flip, before plunging out a window. It’s a disorienting trick. Later on in the film, a homicide detective who claims to dislike movies, in his dream, conducts an important discussion about filmmaking techniques with Paprika. He explains to her the 180 degree rule of filmmaking, and how following it avoids confusing the audience of the image suddenly flipping. Y’see, this is a movie that endorses its audience to fall in love with how films work. Even more obvious, the homicide detective’s big character arc throughout the movie is to embrace his long-lost passion for films and how that helps his worries.
Paprika is quite sparse in storytelling, with a lot of the character relationships and story developments explained in subtle hints. It’s more concerned with presenting its ideas than with exposition.
Fans familiar with Satoshi Kon’s previous animes will find this film to be a culmination of his body of work. It has Perfect Blue’s schizophrenia, Millennium Actress’ slippery reality, Paranoia Agent’s philosophical questions, and Tokyo Godfather’s warm sense of humanity. You can even feel Kon’s smug-free pride of his own work, as hinted by the display of his last three movies’ posters in a multiplex-within-a-movie (must be a Satoshi Kon film festival playing). Paprika truly is something made by a filmmaker who’s looking to share the joy of creating these films. It jumps from one fantastical imagery to the next, with both the heroes and the villains constantly morphing into different facades. It makes great use of the animation medium, with stuff that recalls Michel Gondry’s films, but a lot more uneasy because of how well the fantasy blends with the reality – something that live action has yet to achieve, despite state-of-the-art CGI.
Seek this film, because if anything, it can provide you with hours of coffee shop talk about the endless themes presented in it.
"Paprika" opens May 25, 2007 and is rated . . Written by Satoshi Kon, Seishi Minakami, Yasutaka Tsutsui (novel).
