I finished the Stacker Challenge with a couple of weeks to spare and on schedule. It’s December, so the award bait is going to start appearing in the weeks to come, but I don’t live in a big city, so some stuff won’t be coming my way as early as I would like. In the meantime, I have Christmas obligations with family and the girlfriend, so I may not even be getting out to the movie as much as I used to…something that may actually be a good thing, but who’s counting? In the meantime, why not review something off one of my watchlists? The Criterion Channel has some funky sci-fi stuff right now, and the anime movie Paprika is on my Fill-in Filmography poster.
“Funky” is one way to describe this movie.
At some point in the future, the DC Mini was invented. The device, still in its experimental stage, allows the user to enter someone else’s dreams and record them separately. Dr. Atsuko Chiba uses her dream persona Paprika to help people in a form of radical therapy that isn’t necessarily smiled upon by some of the superiors at her job if they even know that she’s doing just that. Her most prominent patient is Detective Konakawa of the police, but he doesn’t seem to know Chiba is Paprika. They don’t even look alike. For her part, Chiba has allies with the DC Mini’s inventor, the child-like and obese Tokita and her immediate supervisor Shima. There’s just one problem: someone stole the DC Mini, and the thief appears to be Tokita’s missing assistant Himuro.
The problem is, in the wrong hands, the thief can use the DC Mini to drive people insane whether they are awake or asleep by preventing them from seeing the difference between dreams and reality, and the people who have been working with or near the missing device are the most susceptible to this effect at first with more and more people being vulnerable the longer the device is missing. Chiba/Paprika may be the best chance to find it with the two sides of the same woman using their respective knowledge and skills to find the device before it’s too late because, it turns out, the person has some very definitive ideas on how to use it that won’t be good for anybody.
This movie being anime, and in Japanese with subtitles no less, I knew one thing going in: the animation was probably going to be gorgeous. And it was: the opening credits show Paprika running around the city and showing off the sorts of things she can do before having her essentially slide into a car that Chiba is driving, the first appearance Chiba makes in the movie. The Paprika sequences are all rather impressive as she makes moves in dreams that the cast of Inception could only, no pun intended, dream of. She travels through billboards and changes size as needed. Pretty much any time Paprika (as opposed to Chiba) is onscreen, something cool is likely to be happening before too long.
However, it helps that the movie is actually a compelling story on top of everything else. Chiba and Paprika are, for most of the movie, treated as something like separate characters were Paprika seems to be younger, perkier, and a lot more friendly. She basically is the literal Manic Pixie Dream Girl with minimal Manic. The mystery plot also largely works. The movie never quite explains what is and isn’t a dream, and there’s a point where it looked like Chiba/Paprika was almost a damsel-in-distress that needed Konakawa to save the day. But the animation and the clever dream ideas make up for whatever minor complaints I had. I don’t know if I am going to be getting more of my watchlist movies covered in the next two weeks or so, but I do hope I enjoy them as much as I did this one.
Grade: A-
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