Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07

Kon’s visuals dazzle in dizzying Paprika

Satoshi Kon’s animated fantasmaganza Paprika, adapted from Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel, starts on a circus stage. A clown car enters as a man (who happens to look exactly like J Jonah Jameson from the Spider-Man comics) is in the stands, telling a clown-masked passerby that someone is watching him. It’s the ringmaster, who has the spotlight cast on him, and suddenly the man’s trapped in a cage at centre stage, then watches in horror as a swarm of people, all with his face, are told to attack him. The bottom drops out of the bigtop and he falls into a Tarzan world, then a Bond-like flick and finally a red-carpeted hallway, where a man is floating just above the ground.

Confused yet? The plot details in Paprika can get a bit murky, but the bottom never does drop out of Kon’s festive film, mostly because of the strange, fascinating delights that come alive in each new dream we’re whisked through.
The man—Captain Konakawa, a cop—was having a dream about the shadowy figure behind an unsolved murder and Paprika is helping him figure it out. Thanks to the recently invented DC Mini, dreams can be accessed and played back on computer. Paprika herself is a girlish redhead who seems to be (though this is one of those aspects of the film that’s fuzzy) the projected dream-investigator and alter ego of Atsuko, a woman who works at the labs where the corpulent, immature genius Dr Tokita developed the DC Mini. (Any emotional weight to Atsuko’s and Tokita’s relationship, centred on Japanese notions of responsibility and duty, gets lost in the cultural translation.) They’re overseen by Chief Shima, a friend of Konakawa, and by the Chairman. But when others’ dreams start exploding into reality, Atsuko/Paprika has to figure out who’s behind it all and stop the nocturnal unconscious from bleeding into the day-to-day world.

The animated style here involves clean lines and a brilliant palette. Creases and folds of noir-ish shadow are played off against projected shafts and bars of light—Paprika is about film genres and a tribute to the mutability of the dreamlike film image. Embodying the fluidity of animation, Paprika and others move between worlds and dreams, slipping in and out of the warpholes of billboards, movie screens, TVs, posters and laptop screens. (After all, Paprika says, the internet, like dreams, is where the “repressed conscious mind vents.”)

The main invading dream is a spectacular parade of fridges, creepy-cute dolls, robots and animals that streams on in a Freudian babble. Soon dreams merge, selves split, bodies sludge and bloated egos rampage. But the film’s generic foundation, the whodunit, is a façade in a story where there’s no real sense of threat, since every “reality” can slip-slide into another. Even Konakawa and Shima, near the film’s end, stare at each other, confounded, and ask if they are still in a dream or back in the “real world.” Notions about eugenics, scientific ethics and technology as a Pandora’s Box don’t feel fully formed.

While legendary countryman Hayao Miyazaki’s animations are closer to a folk story tradition and strive for a sense of magic, Kon’s Paprika is more of a video game-era film that’s interested in a kind of post-modern playfulness. But its visual collision of mindscapes, films within films and dreams within dreams cascade into a dizzying rush that easily washes away the humdrum dialogue and somewhat sketchy plot. V Fri, Sep 14, Mon, Sep 16 (9 pm)
Sat, Sep 15, Tue, Sep 18 (7 pm)
Paprika
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Written by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Seishi Minakami, kon
Metro Cinema, $10

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