Satoshi Kon’s fourth and last feature sends a therapist into other people’s dreams and then lets the dreams come back out. The pictures are the finest of his career and the plot never quite keeps up with them. We recommend it, with patience.
The idea is simple enough to write on a napkin. A machine lets you enter someone else’s dream; the machine is stolen; the thief starts putting dreams into people who are awake. Satoshi Kon and Seishi Minakami, adapting Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel, take that napkin and draw on both sides of it and the table underneath. Paprika is a 90-minute thriller that behaves like a much longer one, and it is the most purely pleasurable thing Kon made. It is also, in its last third, a film whose story is less interesting than its wallpaper. We recommend it warmly and we think you should be told that first.
The set piece everyone remembers is a parade. Refrigerators march in step. A torii gate walks on its own legs. Dolls, frogs with drums, a Statue of Liberty, a procession of salarymen, all shuffling to a chant that sounds like a children’s song played through a kettle. It first appears in the chief’s head, then in the office, then in the street. We laughed at it for about a minute, and then we noticed that the people joining the parade were smiling in a way that was not right, and the laugh went. Kon does that more than once: the thing that delights you is the thing that has come to get you.
Susumu Hirasawa’s score is the reason the parade works. He mixes synthetic voices with a real chorus so that you cannot tell which is which, and the main theme bounces along like a hit single from a country that does not exist. Michiya Katō, credited with cinematography, is the man compositing the layers, and the dream scenes have a depth of field and a light bloom that the office scenes deliberately do not. Yumi Jinguji and Takeshi Seyama cut so that a character can walk out of one dream and into another mid-stride, or lean on a wall that is a poster that is a window. We stopped trying to catch the joins after ten minutes, which we think was the intention.
Megumi Hayashibara plays both women, and the trick is that Paprika sounds like a person Chiba would disapprove of. Akio Otsuka’s Konakawa is the film’s best character: a detective with a nightmare he cannot finish, who turns out to have an old grievance about the cinema. His scenes in a bar that exists only online, tended by two barmen voiced by Kon himself and by Tsutsui, are the calmest in the film, and the ones where the script is most honest about what it is really talking about, which is films and the people who make them. Toru Furuya’s Tokita is a large, gentle genius drawn as a joke about eating, and the joke is made a few times too often.
The plot is where it goes soft. Who took the DC Mini and why is delivered in a pair of speeches, and the why is not much more than a grudge dressed up as a principle. Tohru Emori’s Seijiro Inui objects to the machine on the grounds that dreams are sacred, and the film never examines whether he might have a point. The final movement grows physically larger, a thing that happens in Japanese animation the way car chases happen in American thrillers, and the bigger it gets the less we cared. Koichi Yamadera’s Morio Osanai is given a motive in a single scene and then asked to carry the ending on it.
Against Kon’s own work it is looser than Perfect Blue, less moving than Millennium Actress and a great deal odder than Tokyo Godfathers. It is the one to show someone who thinks animation for adults means swearing. Christopher Nolan’s Inception arrived four years later with a similar machine and a similar hotel corridor, and it is worth watching this afterwards to see how much cheaper and stranger the same idea can be made.
Watch it twice. The first time the pictures run ahead of you and you will not know who is asleep. The second time you will, and the parade will still be waiting.
