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Review, following my initial naughty preview on Crunchyroll, and the subsequent, rapturously received showing at around 2am on Sunday morning to a cinemaful of tired but ecstatic viewers.
WELL I TRIED MY BEST BUT THEY'RE PROBABLY UNAVOIDABLE SO GET USED TO IT SPOILERS
Anyone remember that movie The Cell? In which a female psychiatrist with the technologically-inspired power to enter and influence people's unconscious minds forms an alliance with a male detective, entering the mind of a comatose psychotic killer to locate the whereabouts of his final victim. If you've seen it, you'll know that it had a weak script, indifferent performances, a cynically magpie approach to art direction and production, no emotional weight, an adolescent fascination with torture and murder and a nastily misogynistic streak right down the middle. Now imagine the prospect of a movie with a similar plot, that takes all these negatives and transforms them into gold. That's Paprika.
Dr. Atsuko Chiba is cool, remote and hypercompetent in her everyday life, as she must be to manage the oddball team of emotionally underdeveloped male geniuses with which she's co-created the DC Mini, a tiny device for accessing dreams. She allows her playful, empathetic and vivacious side free expression only in the form of Paprika, the alter-ego which she uses to conduct dream therapy sessions with the DC Mini's prototype. The middle-aged detective Captain Konakawa, neurotically obsessed with his current murder case, is her patient, with whom she meets only online and via the DC Mini interface but never in person, as the prototype has not been approved for field use. The theft of the DC Mini, which has not been programmed with access codes and can be used to influence the mind of anyone who has previously used it, obliges the project head Dr. Shima to ask his college friend Konakawa for help.
That's the plot box. What it's about is growing up, failing to grow up, jealousy, fantasy, megalomania, the tempting impossibility of controlling your feelings, compassion and (saccharine alert) "the magic of movies". The loaded, all but cliched images that saturate the private dreams of the protagonists - dolls, butterflies, kings, flight, adventure, labyrinths - are given vast resonance as Satoshi Kon ties them into a breakneck tour of popular cinema, with everything from Peter Pan to Roman Holiday in the mix. Of course, these cinematic dreams feed right back into our unconscious longings, but where another, more cynical filmmaker might have allowed the film to deteriorate into a didactic admonishment to us to grow up and leave such childish yearnings behind, Kon allows for an emotionally charged outcome that permits acceptance of fantasy rather than rejection. That's right, Satoshi Kon of all directors is the Spielberg we want and deserve!
This movie is ninety minutes with not a moment wasted. It's visually unparalleled, gutbustingly funny, primally horrifying and heartbreakingly tender. And if the moment comes when Captain Konakawa finally answers the question that has been posed to him throughout the film, and you don't immediately stand on your seat and cheer the roof off, you're not a friend of mine, movies or life.
END
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