Paprika

(Minor spoiler warning. The superior video version is on my profile)

Trying to understand Paprika is like trying to recall a dream you just woke up from. Satoshi Kon constantly explored with the blending of fantasy and reality, though it wouldn't be until he managed to make Paprika, that he finally felt he was able to find closure by doing what he had always dreamed of. This being making a work about the blending of dreams and reality specifically. Since 1998, Kon wanted to adapt Paprika. It's creator, Yasutaka Tsusui, had seen Kon's work on metafiction, and had also come the same opinion. The Paprika manga even has the same birthday as Kon's. You could say the creation of this movie felt like one out of destiny.

Kon's tug of war transitions between dreams and reality are a direct representation that comes from his thoughts and analysis about the mind. We could be talking to a person. As we talk, we bring up things that remind us of past events. Your memories about that event start to blend with your current conversation. Our mind begins travelling back and forth between the two. We are in the room conversating, and also reliving this memory at the same time. This blend is part of what inspired Satoshi's Kon directing style. We are not aware that our minds move in this manner. Paprika shows us directly and literally to make us aware of this.

The parade represents the mindset of the novel. The DC Mini's effects on reality were just beginning and seemed to have created it. It starts furthest from civilization in the desert, moves through the jungle, over a bridge, and then overflows and invades reality. I saw it as the subconscious parts of our dreams approaching us. It also represents the old inanimate objects we threw away, and religion. We have forgotten these things, but our unconscious is returning them to us.

To me, Paprika is Satoshi Kon's most misunderstood work. It gets easily dismissed for being nonsensical, and yet so much of the film is filled with quality meaning behind its shots. The famous parade scene itself felt like a surreal and heavy commentary on Japanese society. Putting a spotlight on high suicide rates, hopelessly delusional people that work regular full time jobs who never managed to achieve their dreams despite they still want to, parents who use their kids as cash cows, voyeur photos and old Japanese men who date young girls, poverty and homeless, and people stuck to their computers that feel there is nothing. Not only that, politicians and their lies, as shown by one being a Daruma doll. Having its one eye blank could mean that it did not fulfill what it set out to do. Politicians and how they compete for power and use God as a way to justify their running for it, Religion used by people as a crutch to keep themselves sane with fake happiness.

Merging the world's subconscious after the parade invaded took the mask off the people, and made them say how they really felt. It's a dangerous high that plays on their insanity and delusions. A person's state of mind in a dream is dangerously unstable and often oblivious to danger. I can to all the things I wand to do. I can do all the things I am not allowed to do.

Law and order don't exist in my dreams. They are chaotic. If they are not sealed away from reality, the world would be destroyed. I'm given too much power and control. Still, what feels like my own fears and anxiety crush me at times and make me feel the worst fear I ever felt. Sometimes, I make precious memories in my dreams, just to be disappointed when I wake up that they were not real.

Kon was writing to appeal towards the unconsciousness of the viewer. He believed that a film being made to be 100% comprehensible would be boring. He believed these "mysteries" in his films should not be made to confuse the story. The idea was for the audience to use their imaginations given by these "little margins" to interpret the films differently as they rewatch them.

Dreams and the internet are similar. Just as people escape and dive deep into the night into the world created to them by the internet, removed from reality, dreams do something similar. Part of our subconscious comes out in these two types of underworlds, where, for example people being anonymous on the internet are willing to say things they would never say offline.

Repetition is also used in Paprika to show how the dreaming character is progressing throughout the movie in their mental and emotional growth. The audience are shown changes that they would notice in these scenes.

Kon talked about how he had ideas come to him suddenly. One came to him during a taxi drive home in the rain. He saw the drops going down the window combine into one, and felt this was a good way to visually add to the conversation Chiba and Shima were having about the dreams coming together into one huge delusion for the old chairman.

One of the challenges of Paprika was the blending of 2D and 3d. Kon felt they had to be harmonious to each other, and managed to lead a talented enough team to use CGI that looked good and was not distracting. Even now CGI is a hotter topic of debate with more full CGI anime coming out. Too many people do not like CGI anime simply because it is CGI. That is a misguided opinion. As long as it is done well, there isn't a problem. It's tragic when it is not, or when an anime has a great story and characters, but the production doesn't look good enough.

Kon felt at the time that, from his own experience, there is not enough staff to meet the ever increasing production of anime. He stressed the importance of education because the crews aren't maturing. He said, during his time, that the people who have access to the technology are often over 40 and that they can't work forever. He felt that for animation to continue at the same level or to go beyond would be difficult.

On the topic of anime production, Kon preferred making films rather than TV series. He said that TV anime have tighter schedules, smaller budgets, and that it comes to points where you have to chose what parts you want to emphasize. An interesting story has to be told right, and this poses a bit of a challenge. For film, they might not be as long as a tv series, but Kon prefers the bigger budget, more time on the schedule, and producing something of higher quality. A movie may be short, but it is packed full of quality per minute than a tv series is.

Tokita and Chiba feel misunderstood to me. Tokita has a childlike view of the world that is naive. He doesn't truly realize the risks and dangers of his genius inventions. Chiba is stoic and has this rigidness to her character. Paprika is the excitement that is missing in her; the spice, you could say.

They're dynamic is a bit chaotic, but playful. They become closer and accept each other's flaws. Kon said that when these two unbalanced people come together, they compliment each other and bring more harmony into each other's lives. A funny detail in the film is that in the scene where Chiba helps Tokita get out of the elevator, they cut right as he falls on her. We've all seen what these types of scenes do in anime, where the man accidently grabs the woman. They didn't even give that a chance here. There is a line where Tokita tells Paprika that he swallows everything. It wasn't to be taken literally. To me, this felt like a very romantic scene where he is saying he accepts Chiba and Paprika; everything about her.

The antagonists used dreams as a form of attack. These came from their patients, and were used to manipulate the consciousness of their victims. This form of manipulation felt like the most dehumanizing exercise of power because, unlike the exercise of obstructive physical force, the visible coercive and authoritarian power where the intent of his adversaries and the sources of assault and frustration are known to the subject, manipulation “is a form of power that cannot be openly resisted by the power subject since he is unaware of the power holder’s intent or even sometimes of his existence. There is no visible command or him to disobey, no identifiable adversary against whom to assert his freedom.”

Himeru became the most unsettling monster to me. He was used as a puppet, portrayed as an empty shell, controlled by the roots of the chairman. It was shown he was into men, by his idealization, or fetishization of Osanai's body. It's interesting to me that he was able to manipulate Chiba's perception of reality through the powers of the DC Mini. But his mind became lost, and the dreamification of his consciousness twisted Himuro into a manifestation of surreal and horrifying nightmares.

Osanai was a petty man. Resorting to selling his body to Himuro for the DC mini, and to the chairman for power. He very expressively showed how disgusted he was with this, and you can see this disgust in his face remembering what he did when he gets reminded by HImuro's dirty magazines about men. He loved Chiba, but knew it could never happen as he saw how eagerly she'd mention how great Tokita was to her, annoying him in the process. Knowing that he was not as good as him, he resorted to cheap and lazy ways to get ahead of the curve. Even then, love prevailed, and he was not able to truly place the chairman in front of Chiba. I saw Osanai as the most tragic character in the series.

Konakawa intrigued me that his battle shifted from reality to dreams. He fought against his subconscious in this state to overcome the guilt he had over what was said to had been a friend to a battle against himself. Like the parade, his love of films returned to him in his dreams though he was rejecting them, and you can see the delight he had when Osanai overlapped with the murder case in his dreams, and shot him down, "finishing the movie," allowing him to defeat his guilt, and reinvigorated his love of film. He was looking for love in Paprika, though the love he found at the end was for his old friend, his passion.

Kon is gone. Dreaming Machine began to manifest in Paprika, as there had always been a connection between his movies because of how he made them. I don't know if we'll ever see it, and can't say. Paprika left us with an ambitious visual and directorial style that is unmatched by how Kon made it so precise to his consciousness, that he said other people would not be able to understand Dreaming Machine. And maybe no one ever will, but I will continue to interpret and dream about his work. The conversation about his work will never be over, and new thoughts will always appear. You may have left to the other world, but the memory of you will remain eternal.