Paprika.

With Paprika seeing a slow roll-out in US theaters starting on Friday in New York, Dave Kehr offers a primer on Satoshi Kon in the New York Times: "The creator of Perfect Blue (1998), Millennium Actress (2001) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003), Mr Kon is at the forefront of a new movement in Japanese animation, or anime, that has little or nothing to do with Speed Racer and the other Japanese animated series that clog Saturday morning television.... The fantasy world of anime is not necessarily a benign one."

"Set in a business world of long white corridors and glass walls and research labs, it's a Freudian-Jungian-Felliniesque sci-fi thriller, and an outright challenge to American viewers, who may, in the face of its whirligig complexity, feel almost pea-brained," writes David Denby in the New Yorker.

Updated through 5/27.

"Usually when nightmares are portrayed in a film and anime, it's very dark. For Paprika, we wanted it to be disgustingly decadent and grossly colorful - and that was our idea." John Lichman talks with Kon for the Reeler.

Update, 5/22: "The movie comes on like a mix between a vintage surrealist short and a state-of-the-art blockbuster - the two modes corresponding, Paprika says, to the early and late cycles of REM sleep," writes Rob Nelson in the Voice. "Paprika, like the best work of Kon's compatriots Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), is a movie in which, minute to minute, basically anything can happen; the narrative is almost completely unbound."

Updates, 5/23: "What's Paprika?" asks Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "It's the locus of a turf war between the conscious and unconscious mind. In short, a movie."

"Paprika amounts to soulless characters in remarkably flat animation talking epistemological gobbledegook among watered-down psychedelia," grumbles Jürgen Fauth.

"I think for most viewers this mad spectacle will open up the cerebellum, but mine gets tired out from too much ocular overload," writes Robert Cashill. "Paprika is something to see, but given its accent on sleeping states resting through parts of it is an option. Bring a pillow, and your capacity to dream."

Updates, 5/25: You can, of course, watch Paprika "just for the pictures, secure in the knowledge that you're getting the best damned delirium your moviegoing dollar can buy," suggests Stuart Klawans after riffing at length in the Nation on Dr Chiba/Paprika's treatment of the cinephobic Detective Konakawa. "If you're feeling ambitious, though, and want to interpret and not just dream, you can watch Paprika as a cartoon feminist Civilization and Its Discontents, and Kon will reward that reading, too."

"[I]f you keep your eye on the screen and don't overworry the plot particulars, you will be rewarded with a cavalcade of charming, gently outré and beautiful hallucinations," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It can take a moment to situate yourself amid this splendidly controlled chaos. But this superabundance works to one of the film's themes, namely that our fantasies, including those opened up by the Internet, are pulling us away from the material world and, perhaps, more dangerously from one another."

"Paprika's story line combines elements of Blade Runner and Wim Wenders's strange apocalyptic fantasy Until the End of the World, both of which imagined the damage that could be wrought by a machine that invades human memories and dreams," notes Slate's Dana Stevens. "The metaphysical trickery of Paprika - what's real, what's imagined, who's dreaming whom—would lose its charm if explained in too much detail. True, the final battle-for-Tokyo scene veers toward the grandiose, and the Möbius-strip story logic has some holes in it. But I'll bet it's been a while since you've seen a movie, animated or not, that skips this nimbly around the viewer's brain."

"Paprika's frustrations are inseparable from its design: rather than being concerned with fantasy per se, Kon's interested in the way fantasy affects the world," suggests Steve Erickson for Nerve.

Updates, 5/27: Paprika's "trippy imagery connects it to the free-your-mind 60s of the Merry Pranksters, Timothy Leary and El Topo," writes Jason Silverman for Wired News. "But 40 years later, it's technology, not LSD, that's fueling the growing number of inner-space journeys."

Scarlet Cheng profiles Kon for the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at May 21, 2007 12:27 PM