Perfect blue: a genre study

TOKYO GODFATHERS (2003)

Tokyo Godfathers is more linear and steeped in realism than Kon’s other works. Taking place on Christmas Eve, the film – inspired very loosely by John Ford’s Three Godfathers – follows a bande à part of homeless people, middle-aged alcoholic Gin, teenage runaway Miyuki, and flamboyant trans woman Hana, who discover a baby in a pile of rubbish in Tokyo. As with Kon’s other films, Tokyo Godfathers opens with a performance within a performance, only this time, it’s an ideal far removed from the lives of our protagonists. The audience sees a group of children singing a Christmas carol, before – classic Kon – widening the shot to reveal a stage set, a nativity play at a soup kitchen.

Though it doesn’t partake in his other films’ examinations of media, fan obsession, and technology, Tokyo Godfathers is concerned with identity, and the hastily drawn stereotypes that confine us. Led by Kon’s unflinching focus on real-life subjects’ (the homeless, LGBTQ+, and immigrant population of Tokyo) that are rarely shown in film, bar the occasional two-dimensional trope, Kon uncovers the truth behind these characters, their defensive self-deceptions, and backstories.

Transcending the strict boundaries of the patriarchal gaze, Kon picks apart the idea of the nuclear family in favour of a chosen one. It’s here that Hana takes on the role of ‘wife’ to Gin and ‘mother’ to the abandoned baby who she names Kiyoko, while Miyuki adopts the role of older sister. When the unlikely quartet finally track down who they believe to be the baby’s biological mother, it turns out to be a farce, further breaking down the preconceived idea of what makes a family.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Acting is a profession dedicated to transforming oneself into someone else via performance, to making the unreal seem real. Kon’s subtlest — and arguably best — film is his second to use acting to expose the thin line between fact and fantasy. A duo of documentarians sits with the reclusive aged actress Chiyoko Fujiwara and films her as she tells the story of her life. That story is conflated with those of the films in which she starred in a manner that eliminates the boundary between Chiyoko’s real experiences and her acting roles. All the while, the documentarians themselves impossibly appear in Chiyoko’s recollections. Or is it impossible? Where Perfect Blue questions the distinction between truth and fiction, Millennium Actress demolishes it, and while the latter also has a tragedy at the center of its story, it is a gentler viewing experience than the former — almost as if Kon were telling his audience that if it accepts the intersection of the real and the unreal, living will be gentler too.

Paprika (2006)

An adaptation of the 1993 technological thriller novel of the same name, Paprika is Kon’s final finished feature film and probably his best-known work in the U.S. This is the film that pushes Kon’s questioning of where reality ends and fantasy begins closest to its limits. Dr. Atsuko Chiba is a psychologist researching a technology that allows its users to experience other people’s dreams. She sometimes uses it illegally to help her patients by entering their dreams, where she takes on a new persona: Paprika. When the device is stolen and the thief begins wreaking havoc on people’s minds, Atsuko undertakes a hunt to find the culprit that results in a merging of the dream world with waking life and one of the most stunning sequences in animation history: a parade of dreams that simultaneously satirizes contemporary issues in Japan, stretches the limits of its audience’s imagination, and puts both Kon’s craft and his creativity on full display.

Perfect Blue (1997)

Satoshi Kon’s fascination with cinema makes it all the more baffling that the Academy never recognized his work. After all, there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a movie about the movies, and Perfect Blue is the first of two. Its protagonist, the retired J-pop idol Mima Kirigoe, turns to acting as her next profession and then her world begins to fall apart: Stalked by an obsessive fan, cast in a traumatizing role that requires her to perform in a rape scene, she discovers a website that contains far too intimate records of her life. Regret over leaving her past behind and stress over her new existence add up, and Mima begins to question not just her reality but her whole self. The film’s themes are quintessentially contemporary: After all, what’s more timely in 2022 than a film about the complexity of identity and the horrors of being perceived? And its chase sequence remains one of the greatest in animation history.

The Early Work

Before carving out one of Japanese animation’s great careers, Kon found some success as a mangaka. His manga debut, Toriko (1984), attracted the attention of Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, who hired him as an assistant for both his manga and his anime. Kon continued writing manga of his own, including an adaptation of Otomo’s 1991 live-action film World Apartment Horror — which was written by Cowboy Bebop screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto — and his 1996 manga magnum opus, conveniently titled Opus, about a manga artist who is literally sucked into his own work in a fashion foreshadowing the films to come. He also directed a single episode of the 1993 OVA adaptation of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, among a handful of key animating and other design credits.

PAPRIKA (2006)

Paprika, based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 novel of the same name, marks a return to and elaboration upon Kon’s themes of reality and unreality, fact versus fiction, fantasy and memory, and the often blurred lines between them. Kon had originally wanted to adapt the book after Perfect Blue but budget restraints meant that the project was put on hold. Despite this, Kon has spoken openly about the influence of Tsutsui’s book on his work, speaking in Andrew Osmand’s Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist: “I read the novel when it was published and it made me want to incorporate the idea of dreams fusing into reality into my movies, so that’s what I did with Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress. Now, I’ve made the source of my inspiration into its own film, I’ve got some closure.” Paprika is, then, an amalgamation of Kon’s filmography to date, a working through, and conclusion of, the style of filmmaking that inspired him in the first place.

Watching Paprika feels like stepping into Kon’s mind, complete with porcelain dolls, froggish dream parades, and gargantuan parades of kitchen appliances that literally run amok throughout the film. Seamlessly merging the individual psyche with a collective cyberspace, the film begins with Dr Chiba treating a police detective using a piece of technology called the DC Mini that can access people’s dreams. When the DC Mini is stolen, the doctor’s free-spirited computer avatar, Paprika, bends time and space, changing her identity with ease, from Disney’s Tinker Bell to the Sphinx, and everything in between.

Each dream sequence in Paprika nods to Kon’s various movie inspirations. The most blatant, perhaps, is The Greatest Show on Earth that manifests as a tumultuous circus Pee-wee’s Playhouse parade of anthropomorphised toys, gadgets, historical monuments, and religious icons. As Paprika bounces from one dream to the next (in a near-identical style to Cham Mima in Perfect Blue), she passes scenes from Roman Holiday and James Bond’s From Russia With Love, again highlighting Kon’s love of live-action. It’s the sort of deranged dream logic that only Kon could pull off.

The film ends with the detective visiting a cinema showing Kon’s earlier works, a final self-reflective joke, perhaps. While Kon wasn’t to know that Paprika would be the final film (see: Dreaming Machine) he’d complete before his death, it serves as a poetic conclusion to his filmography, however much we’d like to dream otherwise.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

Kon’s most sentimental film is also his least surreal (albeit still deeply weird) and a great Christmas movie to boot. A retelling of sorts of the Biblical tale of the Three Wise Men, it’s a skewed reinterpretation of John Ford’s 1948 western 3 Godfathers, itself an adaptation of that tale. On Christmas Eve, three unhoused people in Tokyo find an abandoned newborn left in a dumpster with a note and a key. The trio — a middle-aged alcoholic, a transgender woman, and a tween runaway — endure a series of dramatic encounters and almost unbelievable coincidences in a desperate attempt to return the child to her parents. While not as surrealist, on the face of it, as Kon’s other works, the film is just as interested in liminality: the fine line between family and found family, the lives of people living on societal margins, and the razor-thin gap between the disastrous and the miraculous.

Paranoia Agent (2004)

In a city just outside Tokyo, a boy on roller blades bludgeons toy designer Tsukiko Sagi at night with a bent golden baseball bat. She does not see his face. Shonen Batto — or Li’l Slugger, as he’s known in the English dub — soon becomes a serial assailant, striking again and again at seemingly random targets as the two detectives assigned to the case struggle to discern his identity and motive. Meanwhile, the city’s citizens sink deeper into anxiety, depression, and fear, and Tsukiko’s story becomes all the more strangely linked to Li’l Slugger’s attacks. Kon’s only television series is, like Perfect Blue before it and Paprika after, a postmodernist psychological thrill ride, and the 13-episode runtime gives the determinedly alinear, characteristically surreal story room and time to build an amount of tension that is extraordinary even for Kon’s works. (This one isn’t part of the ongoing retrospective, but it’s streaming on Funimation for free.)

PERFECT BLUE (1997)

The film that jumpstarted Kon’s career, Perfect Blue was originally meant as a live-action film. But after the Kobe earthquake of 1995 damaged the production studio, reducing the film’s budget to an animation, the project was handed to Kon, who developed his experimental storytelling in response to the film’s tough budget and runtime constraints. Based on Yoshikazu Takeuchi’s novel by the same name, Perfect Blue – at its most basic – is a complex and shocking psychological thriller about a pop idol whose decision to leave her career to become an actor has extremely disturbing consequences.

Perfect Blue announces its preoccupation with perception, identity, voyeurism, and performance right from its opening sequence. Before any credits, the ‘camera’ focuses on a group of Gundam-style Power Rangers, before pulling back to reveal a stage performance. It’s a warm-up, we’re told, for a group of pop idols, called Cham. As they finally go on stage to perform to their fans – who are all men – the title flashes on the screen, and the scene cuts again to lead member Mima seated on a train looking at her reflection.

Within minutes, Kon establishes a number of themes – among them, that what initially appears to be real, isn’t. As Susan Napier writes in her essay Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi: “The perception of reality cannot be trusted, with the visual set up only to not be reality, especially as the psychodrama heights towards the climax.” Throughout the film, Kon sets the viewer up, showing what appears to be a real sequence of events, only to pull back to reveal a TV set or stage.

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001)

If Perfect Blue shows the horrors of idol-dom, Millennial Actress is its mirror image. Featuring an actress, an obsessive fan, and the blending of fiction and reality, Millennium Actress sheds the pathological gaze of the former in favour of an elegant and uplifting one: a shining ode to the golden age of Japanese cinema, told through the life of a fictional actress, Chiyoko, whose story is unveiled through dreamlike sequences through her oeuvre.

Described by the New York Times as a “headlong cartoon love letter to the grand tradition of post-World War II live-action Japanese cinema, from samurai epics to urban domestic dramas to Godzilla,” Millennium Actress has all the hallmarks of Perfect Blue’s experimental style. Opening with a space scene (and, most likely, a Death Star reference), the camera zooms out to reveal a film set. But unlike Perfect Blue, where the camera trickery feels disorientating and violent, Millennium Actress is a tapestry where scenes tumble into one another. Unconstrained by chronology, Chiyoko walks in and out of period movies, which not only serve as narratives to her personal history, but also the history of Japanese cinema itself.