requiem for a dream (paprika)

4
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM 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 mind- warps alxjund in Tsutsui's prose, as titles like 4.8 Billion Delusions and My Blood Is tbe Blood ofAnotber suggest. The novelist and part- time actor (in Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini and Shinji Aoyama's Eli, Eli, Lema Sabacbtanif, 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 rhe development of an apparatus that allows the recording of dreams. But when a prototype of this 46 I FILM COMMENT I March-April 2007

Upload: tomoe97

Post on 12-Oct-2014

97 views

Category:

Documents


5 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Requiem for a Dream (Paprika)

REQUIEM FOR A DREAMTHROUGH THE HEART OF SATOSHI KON'SPaprika runs an otherworldly parade—toys, dolls, and assortedephemera, chairs, tables, and other supposedly inanimate objects,all mixed into a writhing, twitching, bouncing, singing cavalcadethat is dizzying in its wealth of detail. First seen crossing a desertdreamscape, this imaginary procession makes its way throughforests and over bridges to spill out into what looks suspiciouslylike our day-to-day urban environment.

Reality is a relative term in the context of animation, and inPaprika, as in most of his previous films, Kon eagerly embraces itspolar opposite. His new film is an adaptation of the 1993 novel of thesame name by Yasutaka Tsutsui, an author who, with good reason,is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Philip K. Dick. Dickian mind-warps alxjund in Tsutsui's prose, as titles like 4.8 Billion Delusionsand My Blood Is tbe Blood ofAnotber suggest. The novelist and part-time actor (in Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini and Shinji Aoyama's Eli,Eli, Lema Sabacbtanif, among others) is famous as much for his

eccentric behavior as for his books: during the Nineties he went onstrike, producing no new work for several years to protest theJapanese 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 adaptPaprika since finishing his directorial debut Perfect Blue in 1997,the author likewise envisioned Kon as the man best suited for thejob of bringing his novel to the screen. Their paths finally crossedin 2003, when a magazine commissioned Kon to interview thenovelist. The deal was made on the spot.

It's not hard to see what attracted the animator to Paprika: inits fusion of dream and waking life, real and unreal, it is prime Konmaterial. Its protagonist, a female research scientist named Atsuko,glides in and out of other people's dreams, where she assumes theshape of a spunky alter ego named Paprika. Her invasions serve ascientific purpose at first, aiding rhe development of an apparatusthat allows the recording of dreams. But when a prototype of this

46 I FILM COMMENT I March-April 2007

Page 2: Requiem for a Dream (Paprika)

THE FILMS OF SATO5HI KON BR1N^_THE_DEPTHS OF THESUBCONSCfOUS INtO BRIGHT ANIME LIGHT BY TOM MESdevice is stolen and used to mentally incapacitate the researchteam, her descents into the maelstrom of the mind become aninvestigation in which she is aided by a traumatized detective suf-fering from a tenacious recurring nightmare.

It will come as no surprise that dream and waking life soon startto merge to the point of becoming indistinguishable. What is sur-prising, though, is that the borders that cordon off such domains asthe Internet and the cinema also fade away. And it's not just bordersthat disappear but also definitions. For much of Paprika's runningtime, any environment that can be drawn and seen is real. Or unreal.

This marks out Kon as a man with a keen awareness of hismedium. Like Hayao Miyazaki, who has a comparable penchantfor flights of fancy, Kon regards himself first and foremost as "'aman who draws pictures." But the modesty of this statement isdeceptive in an era when the increasing technological complexityof animation can seem little more than a veil for a new form ofcomplacency. With a few honorable exceptions, Hollywood's

hegemony over the field of digital animation has given rise to anassembly-line mentality, with a new CGi cartoon rolling off the con-veyor belt every other month, indistinguishable from its predeces-sors, cast from the same mold of synthetic animals/dolls/carsspeaking in celebrity voices and embarking upon quest scenarios.

Back in 2001, Hironobu Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy: The SpiritsWithin shattered a lot of Utopian dreams of an all-digital cinema,when its soulless protagonists found themselves displaying theirsuperhuman prowess to empty theaters. Perhaps the current com-placency is a direct result of that film's failure; mainstream digitalanimators lost their main raison d'etre, that of conquering cinemaas a whole by way of the closest possible imitation of reality. Hav-ing found no new goals, their ambition now seems reduced totweaking a hair here and a fingernail there.

In sharp contrast stands the man who draws pictures. Kon

Spice of life: 12 scenes from Paprika

March-April 2007 ' FILM COMMENT I 47

Page 3: Requiem for a Dream (Paprika)

Millennium Actress

doesn't bother to imitate reality not only because whatever he cre-ates will be instantly recognizable as a drawing but also because todo so would only limit his options. Better yet, it's the very unreal-ity- of drawings that attracts many Japanese animators in the firstplace. Whereas films like Osamu Dezaki's Go/go i j : The Profes-sional (83} and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (88) flaunted the noveltyof digital animation, the efforts of many of today's artists to inte-grate CGI even go so far as to camouflage it as hand-drawn eel ani-mation, as in Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle.

IN KON'S ANIMATED WORK, ESCAPE FROMthe clutches of reality is central. His early career as a manga artistpaved the way for a role as background artist on Patlabor z {93)and Roujin Z (91), projects supervised by Mamoru Oshii andKatsuhiro Otomo respectively. Under Otomo's wing he served inthe same capacity on the omnibus film Memories (95), on whichhe also made his debut as a scriptwriter with a chapter, "MagneticRose," that is almost a blueprint for his later obsessions. Here, ateam of space scavengers encounter a gigantic, rose-shaped pieceof metal and discover its interior to be an ornate opera house.Wbat they have in fact entered is the floating tomb of a long-deadsoprano named Eva, whose ghostly presence soon conjures upholographic reenactments of fragments from her life, both on andoff stage, in which the astronauts are forced to participate.

The original Japanese tide of "Magnetic Rose" ("Kanojo noOmoide") 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 protag-onists to explore and get lost and found in. The deep-space salvageworkers of "Magnetic Rose" are reincarnated as the movie geeks inKon's very similarly plotted Millennium Actress (03), in which areclusive, aging film star recounts her life for the benefit of their videocamera, her reminiscences taking the form of prize moments from thehistory of Japanese cinema. Her two interviewers imagine themselvesas battling samurai In an epic period piece, or as control-room engi-neers 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 anincreasingly confused reality, as pop starlet Mima gives in to pres-sure from her management and agrees to shoot a salacious rapescene for a TV mystery series. Here Kon takes hallucination and psy-chosis as his realm of the unreal, complemented by the Internet.Mima loses control of her destiny and subsequently her mind byallowing the dreams and aspirations of others to supplant her own.Before long, she has become the person she is perceived to be by

Perfect Blue

those around her—her agent, her overbearing chaperone, thestalker who seems to know ail the minutiae of her comings andgoings and reports them on his website. In Mima's tiny apartment,where the only links to her former reality are her regionallyaccented phone calls to her family back home, she slowly succumbsto schizophrenia. Mima's cutesy pop-idol persona becomes anautonomous entit\' that starts to haunt her—knife in hand, ready toend all the confusion.

This intermingling of daily life with dream, memory, halluci-nation, psychosis, cinema, and the Internet reaches new heights inPaprika^ in which the distinction between real and imagined iscompletely erased. Even in the film's early scenes, when we aresupposedly still in the real world, Kon matter-of-factly throws inthe physically improbable: the inventor of the dream recorder isso tall and obese that he gets stuck inside an elevator like Winniethe Pooh after a few too many pots of honey.

Cinema and the Net are alternative portals into dreams. As inPerfect Blue, a website seems to hold the key to unraveling themystery but only provokes another hallucination. The detective incharge of investigating the theft of the dream recorder suffersfrom cinephobia; his nightmares take the shape of a headlongmontage of fragments from classic films, In each of which he playsthe lead. An empty cinema functions as a temporary safe haven,where dreams are projected on the silver screen. Adorned withAkira Kurosawa's trademark cap and shades, the cop explainsfilmmaking's 180-degree rule in a futile attempt to hold on to avestige of normality: "Never cross the imaginary line!"

However, like a recursive picture effect, the womb-like safety ofthe movie theater disappears and the dreams refuse to be confinedto the screen—in both Paprika and the theater in which its viewerssit. Once Atsuko has entered someone's dream, Kon shifts gears andbombards us with images that teem with tiny details, as in the afore-mentioned unruK' serpentine procession, which travels from dreamto dream, coming down off the screen, into the theater; and intrud-ing into what we assumed was reality just a minute earlier. The resultis something unprecedented in Kon's films, a kind of fever-dreamstate shared by characters and viewers alike. While we remainedpassive spectators in the director's earlier work. Paprika^ explosionsof blue butterflies and parading paraphernalia send us hurtling help-lessly into his ever more sophisticated animated universe. D

TOM MES rwts the Japanese film website MidnightEye.com andis the author of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, IronMan: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto, and, ivith Jasper Sharp,The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film.

48 I FILM COMMENT I March-April 2007

Page 4: Requiem for a Dream (Paprika)