There is no doubt in my mind that Satoshi Kon was a great director. His body of work possesses the kind of auteur vision only the most talented of artists are capable of achieving. The way he weaves fantasy and reality together, exploring the increasingly fuzzy line between them through surreal, striking storytelling, makes for the kind of experience you can’t get anywhere else. No one does Satoshi Kon like Satoshi Kon, and it’s a tragedy he was taken from us after only four films and one TV show. That being said, while I recognize Kon as a great director, not all of his work really clicks with me. His talent is undeniable, but the way he tells his stories and the things he chooses to focus on while doing so don’t always line up with my personal preferences. In my opinion, Kon is at his best when his stories truly embrace their human element, putting all that surreal imagery to use in unraveling his characters’ emotions and the struggles they go through. The reason Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers spoke to me so well, despite being as tonally different as possible, is that their focus was on that humanity. In contrast, whenever Kon lets the broader themes and imagery take precedence over the characters, he starts to lose me. And sadly, there are few better case studies for that than Paprika, Kon’s last and, in my opinion, weakest film.

The setting is the near future, and some company has invented a device that lets people traverse dreams. They play to use it as a tool for therapy, allowing therapists to dive right into their patients’ subconscious and help them work through their issues. Unfortunately, the device is stolen by an unknown terrorist, and worse still, the safety guards haven’t been installed yet. This terrorist could theoretically jack into the dreams of anyone using a dream therapy device, or, if things go really bad, he could just start invading everyone’s dreams and mess around with them. Pretty soon, even being awake might not be a safeguard against a dreamworld invasion. So a crack team gets together to plunge into the depths of their dreams and track down the terrorist through the few clues he’s left behind. What follows is pretty much a precursor to Inception: the characters jump through dreams, explore their own subconscious and those of others, and work to find the device before its thief can put it to evil use. And all the while, the characters’ dreams grow increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality, until it’s no longer clear what’s a dream, what’s real, or if there’s even any difference anymore.

As you might expect, a story dealing with the abstract, surreal world of dreams plays right to Kon’s strengths as a visual artist. This is easily his best-looking, most imaginatively designed film of all. From the opening sequence, you’re bombarded with a barrage of creative, instantly striking imagery, worlds that bulge and evolve before your eyes, reality that twists and reconstructs itself, objects that take on a multitude of shifting forms. The central setpiece is a giant dream parade populated by everything from umbrellas to creepy dolls to traditional Shinto statues, and it is gorgeous. It’s rendered entirely in fluid hand-drawn animation, and as it parades its way down the street over the course of this film, it only seems to grow more and more majestic. If the entire point of this film was just for Kon to let loose with a series of surreal images he’d been dying to get out of his head, then it surely accomplished its goal. And even outside the mind-bending setpieces, the character animation, shot composition and editing are as strong as they’ve ever been. Not to mention an incredible dark-electronica soundtrack from Kon’s longtime collaborator Hirasawa Susumu. If nothing else, there’s enough imagination on display here that I can’t call this a bad film by any stretch.

Sadly, that’s where my praise for Paprika end and my criticisms begin. The fact of the matter is, the mind-bending visuals take up so much of this movie’s focus that there’s almost nothing left for the characters. What little development and nuance they get is relegated to a dull, exposition-heavy first twenty minutes setting up the conflict and a few tiny scattered bits afterward. The most fleshed-out member of the cast is the police detective Konakawa, who experienced the device’s dream therapy firsthand and is later drawn into the madness when dreams start colliding. He gets enough screentime for a mostly satisfying arc about unraveling the trauma that led him to the police force in the first place, as well as an opportunity for Kon to flex his obvious love for cinema (though ironically, Konakawa initially hates movies thanks to his trauma). But even he’s merely acceptable, and the rest of the cast is basically dead on arrival. There’ lip service paid to the overweight inventor being a kid trapped in a genius’ body, how his comatose friend was jealous of him because of how alike they are, how the chairman’s right-hand-man has a past of sexual abuse, but it’s all just dialogue and characters explaining their personalities, not actual personalities. There’s even a weird, out-of-nowhere romance in the final act that feels like it’s from an entirely different movie, and you all know how much that stuff sticks in my craw.

The end result is that despite how creative and inventive Paprika’s visuals are, I found myself struggling to pay attention throughout its entire 90-minute runtime. It’s heavy on creative setpieces but basically lacking in reasons to emotionally invest. Plus, for as trippy as the visuals are, the actual plot is way too simple and straightforward- stop the terrorist from doing the Bad Thing- to keep your attention on its own. And by the time the climax rolls around, we’ve somehow got an actual supervillain bad guy for our heroes to defeat, something that Kon’s never done before. His specialty is in going small and intimate with the weight of the characters’ lives, so having this giant colossus stomp around and shout about how he’s going to destroy the universe- yes, really- feels entirely out of place. Even the film’s title character herself feels weirdly shortchanged; she’s the free-spirited alter ego of the ice queen master therapist, her dream self who gives her patients therapy and undertakes most of the heavy lifting of exploring the dream worlds when the plot kicks in. You feel like there should be a really interesting story there about whether her dream self or her “real” self is more representative of her, but again, it’s mostly relegate to a couple lines of dialogue inserted seemingly at random times with no real impact on her character. Perfect Blue, this is not.

It saddens me to be down on Paprika, believe me. This is Kon’s last work before he passed away, and I wish I could leave his oeuvre on a good note. But the lack of a reason to care kept me from enjoying this film as much as I wanted to. It’s little more than a skeleton of a movie, a bare frame embellished with some admittedly amazing surreal imagery and not much else.