Paprika (2006) Premise Film Review

Fig 1. Movie Poster.

The core of Parpika are the dreams, looking at the psychology of the conscious and subconscious mind, exploring the subconscious dreams whilst staying in conscious in reality via the device called the DC Mini. The ideas of this film as Mailloux puts it, “In Paprika, the idea that dreams are an internal mental process that occurs during sleep is far too limited. According to the principles of this world, dreams are not limited to the mind of the dreamer, but rather can leak into the real world.” (Mailloux, n/a). The ideas presented in this film are strange and hard to get your head around when you try to find and understand the logic, ideas such as dreams are windows into other realities and that they have great power are often dismissed as ‘just dreams’, that the boundaries of self awareness are not set by reality but can be revealed by dreams. The director, Satoshi Kon, uses the DC Mini as a metaphor for film - a film’s purpose is to connect our world with a non real one in the screen allowing the fake world to infiltrate the one we live in acting as a portal through to which ideas are presented, just like the dreamworld infiltrates the “real” world of Parpika.


Satoshi Kon was approached at an anime festival by the author of Paprika novel (Tsutsui) that the film was adapted from and asked if he would make his novel into a movie since it was too expensive to do in live action, he agreed to take it on because Kon loved the novel and had previously considered adapting it but it wasn’t until he was requested the project went ahead. Kon graduated from Musashino College of the Arts in Japan with a degree in Graphic Design, he started out as a manga artist and then moved to animation and working as a background artist on many films. In 1995, he wrote an episode of the anthology film Memories, before directing his first feature film: Perfect Blue in 1997.

Fig 2. Dreams represented in first scene.

Paprika is Japanese hand drawn animation which uses little CGI, the choice of medium impacted the narrative massively as with animation anything is possible, your imagination can run wild and you can express it through animation, dreams can be recreated and drawn into life, transforming characters into objects, bringing inanimate objects to life, supporting the theme of dreams and the distortion of the unconscious within a reasonable budget. The process of Paprika was to make the images first and Kon decided the story would exist to give those images meaning, he built the story by connecting the images. Kon calls his process “hoodlum emulation” where he has two sides Satoshi Kon and Hoodlum Kon which he identifies with Atsuko and Paprika. Hoodlum Kon is spontaneous and limitless, he used to sketch and let ideas come from that, his process delayed schedule but if it was organised the film wouldn’t be as effective. It took Kon a year and a half to draw detailed storyboards of the entire film single handedly. Once the storyboard and script was done, production took place and voice recording came after. Part of the idea process was Kon experiencing and drawing his own dreams and letting everyday life inspire him, for example he was in a taxi when it was raining and he was watching the raindrops how they form and collect one another to form one long stream, in the scene where Atsuko and Shima Tora-taroh are in the car talking about how dreams are eating dreams to form one giant illusion, it is being represented visually using raindrops. The story is about how our subconscious affects our dreams so in the very first scene Kon presents that (see fig 2), the darkness represents our subconscious, a little car drives into the spotlight - like dreams it starts off with something minor, then a giant clown pulls itself out of it - like dreams something major comes from that minor thing and before you know it you’re in the middle of something. The entire film is a dream, the creators of Paprika do not know how the film ends and Kon hopes the audience doesn’t either, just like dreams there are no clear endings.

Paprika was received positively by the public, on the day of release in Japan, screenings sold out to the point people had to watch from the standing area. Kon was invited to film festivals including the 63rd Venice International Film Festival and the 19th  Tokyo International Film Festival. The film won three awards: Montréal Festival of New Cinema Award for Public's Choice, the Fantasporto award for Critics Choice Award and the Newport Beach Film Festival award for Feature Film for Best Animation.

Bibliography:

Mailloux, L. (n.d.). Paprika. [online] Cinemablography. Available at: http://www.cinemablography.org/paprika.html [Accessed 30 Jan. 2018].

Perper, T. and Cornog, M. (n.d.). Psychoanalytic Cyberpunk Midsummer-Night’s Dreamtime: Kon Satoshi’s Paprika. Project Muse.

YouTube. (2012). The Making of Paprika - Part 1 of 2. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/hlHCdi6ASE0 [Accessed 30 Jan. 2018].

YouTube. (2012). The Making of Paprika - Part 2 of 2. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFGa4tpM-iM&t=72s [Accessed 30 Jan. 2018].

Illustration List:

Figure 1. Paprika Poster (2006) [Poster] At: http://reader.roodo.com/s3300750/archives/12280497.html

Figure 2. Dreams represented in first scene (2006) At: http://hungnguyenphysics.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-laws-of-physics-in-animation.html