Armed with the tagline "This is your brain on anime", this mindbender from Japanese director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers) arrives on our shores. Entitled Paprika it's a spicy mess but highly enjoyable if you don't think too much about it. Given that the majority of the action takes place in dreams it's perhaps best experienced as just that. Try to absorb the images and then make sense of it all later.
The animators from MadhouseStudios pull out all the stops once again in relating this tale of dream therapy gone awry. The therapists at the Foundation for Psychiatric Research have developed a powerful new device called the DC-Mini which enables them to literally enter a patient's dreams. Invented by a morbidly obese manchild named Tokita, the DC-Mini, which was founded on good intentions, has fallen into nefarious hands and is being used for mind control, threatening to shred the very fabric of reality itself. It seems that it was an inside job and it's up to the research team to try and find the culprit before the devastation spreads. Dr. Chiba, the strong-willed female head of the team must summon her alter ego/alter personality "Paprika" a pychic warrior to enter the increasingly fragmenting dream- world to try and get to the bottom of things. You see everyone's dreams are beginning to meld together into one major bummer of a "I shouldn't have eaten that onion and pastrami sandwich before bedtime" nightmare. Aside from other members of the team Chiba is also helped by Detective Kogawa Toshimi who was being treated for a neurotic condition stemming from a particularly troublesome case. It's an exhilarating race against time as the plot thickens and the true villian is revealed.
Director Kon is at heart an avant-gardist and experimentalist and it would be interesting to see what would happen if he ever went all out and gave us a truly non linear burst of anime. Paprika has no shortage of surreal moments, however, and it is here that the film truly shines. The major drawback to the film is that even though Paprika is visually stunning, it is unfortunately to the detriment of character development or thematic concerns. The main characters are all obviously flawed, Paprika herself is one? of Dr. Chiba's personalities but these flaws are never really fully examined. Also the issues of privacy, the shadow of childhood fantasy, and the morality of certain technologies are merely hinted at and never satisfyingly explored.
The animation is the real star, here, and it's thankfully short on the usual big-eyed cookie cutter looks one normally associates with anime. In fact at times its as if comics legend Jack Kirby is having one hell of a fever dream. Detective Kogawa is the spitting image of Spiderman's boss J. Jonah Jameson, all squared jaw and bluster, and the bizarre dreamscapes could have been lifted straight out of an early seventies Dr. Strange. The wacky metaphysics are also reminiscent of the comics of yesteryear.
Overall, Paprika offers the
best (and sometimes worst) of what anime is all about. A touch of violence, a whiff of perversity,
and a healthy dose of confusion all come together in a package that is
ultimately about the wrapping. In the
case of Paprika rarely has a nightmare looked this good.
FINAL VERDICT: VISUALLY STUNNING WITH SOME TRULY TRIPPY HORRIFIC MOMENTS.
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