Paprika
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Angel-A
Directed by Luc Besson
What’s new is old again in Paprika. The latest anime from Japanese director Satoshi Kon elaborates on ideas about time, space and memory that some of us had gotten our fill of with the Matrix trilogy. But here it is once more: the modern consciousness game, further abstracted via cartoons and hallucinogenic, state-of-the-art computer-graphics. Paprika’s vibrant visual style might seem novel but its content is far less daring than Luc Besson’s traditionally photographed, live-action movie Angel-A. (Both films open this week. Whichever proves most popular will indicate if our film culture is ready to grow up.)
Structured like the pilot for a Saturday morning cartoon TV series, Paprika features a psychotherapist heroine, Dr. Atsuko Chiba, working for the Foundation for Psychic Research. She’s intent on recovering the DC MINI, a new brain-reading device she uses to enter patients’ unconscious, which has been stolen from the lab. Her desperate, noir-like search follows the Alphaville, Blade Runner, Matrix pedigree of sinister futurism. This might seem more sharp-edged than the contemporary street-life scrutiny proposed by the angelic heroine of Angel-A who empathizes with the inner life of a homeless man, yet both films are fairy tales. One’s a cyber-fantasy, the other a spiritual hypothesis. Paprika is just as sentimental, it merely employs a trendy detached style.
Satoshi Kon’s style bounces from sheer artifice to almost representation. Anime’s free-form design still has figures with wooden facial expressions, who move like puppets. Yet many of Kon’s images are oracular: characters who trail a flurry of blue butterflies, actions that defy biology and achieve surreal horror as when the heroine’s psyche is pulled out of her skin. This isn’t what our dreams look like, it’s how anime converts them into a commercialized form. Kon’s color fields recall the post-Disney abstraction of The Incredibles as well as Seijun Suzuki’s gaudy crime drama, Tokyo Drifter. Such stylization maintains a child-safe, teenager-hip distance from realistic danger and adult-world consequences.
All this could be dismissed as kidstuff except that many moviegoers appear to enjoy seeing human experience rendered in a form geared to adolescents. The serious reflection of society that is no longer valued in live-action films seems cool (that is, not serious) in the comic-strip medium. This problem is unmistakable when the cute, Saturday-morning appeal of Paprika’s cartoon heroine contrasts the awe-inspiring, flesh-and-blood personality that actress Rie Rasmussen exhibits in Angel-A. The essentially two-dimensional vs. the existential. That’s why Dr. Chiba needs a crime-fighting alter-ego, a teenage “dream detective” named Paprika.
Kon’s heroine (adapted from a cult novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui) is not quite human or an angel but a modern consumer item, a Spice Girl. Dream-detective Paprika goes where Dr. Chiba can’t, traversing the REM cycles of various characters including repressed police Detective Konakawa, who declares, “Movies don’t interest me!” As a commercial avatar, Paprika’s true mission is to show movies infiltrating the subconscious, how dreams correspond to either art-movies or action-movies. The DC MINI machine stands for new forms of manipulation. Its theft matters to Dr. Chiba/Paprika as a threat to mankind’s sanity; if the DC MINI is misused, it can force waking people into uncontrollable dream states, life in perpetual montage.
That the DC MINI is named after a piece of Sony leisure time software (Sony Pictures Classics is Paprika’s U.S. distributor), suggests that this film comments on the state of pop culture while simultaneously advertising future technology—a DC MINI in every cerebral cortex, or at least every home. Kon’s imagery makes future catastrophe as bright and shiny as a new iPod. Paprika’s numerous references to movie history (replicating iconography from Roman Holiday, Godzilla and King Kong to James Bond and John Woo films) creates a world of pop detritus. The aggregation is chaotic and wearying. Paprika lacks the narrative richness to convey a genuine tragic vision or the wonderment that Angel-A achieves through more emotional, artful means as in the inspired image of an urban moral struggle where wrestling with an angel also evokes the ambition and myth of Icarus.
Kon’s psychedelia (as in a symbolic parade of prancing appliances and utilities) is not the result of drug euphoria but techno stupor. Paprika’s drama remains on the gaming level—humanoid characters, their paper-thin emotions, cel-slick predicaments and digitized adventures. The irony of presenting dehumanization in a dehumanized graphic form sums up anime in a digi-byte.
