Paprika is a spice made from grinding up Bell or Chilli peppers that can be used in many cuisines to add colour and flavour to dishes… Okay, sorry. I just wanted to get that out of the way.
I first found out about Paprika when I heard about the tragic passing of its creator Satoshi Kon. A quick Google search revealed that I was already familiar with the guys work with Paranoia Agent. A critically acclaimed animated series about, well, a kid that goes around on roller-blades beating peoples’ heads in with a baseball bat, or maybe he’s a metaphor for having a mental breakdown, I’m not quite sure…
Satoshi Kon’s film Paprika is about a young woman called Atsubo Chiba who has invented a machine that lets you watch, record and even interact with someone’s dreams for use in Psychiatric therapy. This goes horribly wrong when a prototype version that can affect your dreams remotely gets hijacked by someone and acts of ‘Dream terrorism’ start where they just fire dreams into your brain while you’re still awake. Donning her dreamscape alter-ego ‘Paprika,’ Chiba sets out to get to the bottom of this before the very fabric of reality gets destroyed.
It’s a big concept, and one that’s had head-screw movies made about it before like ExistenZ, The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception. The stories usually devolve into a faux-philosophical debate about whether we can tell between the real world and the dream one… this movie takes the different tack by not only not caring, but by actually letting you know half the time by making the dreams actually, you know, like dreams!
You’ll know you’re seeing a dream when someone explodes into a torrent of snakes or the floor melts beneath someone and they drop down into a parade of singing fridges. The plot does revolve around the constant threat that you could have seamlessly transitioned between the real world and a dream designed to make you jump off of a bridge, but this movie somehow plays it so much better than any other dream-based movie I’ve ever seen, partly because of the influence of Satoshi Kon, and partly because of the animation.
Satoshi-san (is that right?) really pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in animation, which is anything, literally ANYTHING! That stuff about exploding into snakes earlier may have been a joke, but that was just because I don’t want to spoil anything that’s actually in the movie. Paprika manages to be almost hypnotic in how surreal it is, and I loved it.
The movie is by no means perfect, there’s so much going on that some of it just gets confusing and the English dub suffers from the usual problems you get in translated Anime where some lines will yank you right out of the moment. My favourite bit of the film is the opening sequence where Paprika skips and frolics around in a weird combination of reality and dreams in an absolute triumph of animation and music thanks to the soundtrack by Susumu Hirasawa. Not a word is said, but you see everything you need to know and love our protagonist.
I can’t help but feel my experience of the film was soured somewhat by the hype that surrounded it. I heard it was perfect so many times the imperfections leapt out at me while I watched it. So don’t take my word for it, don’t take anyone’s word for it. It’s not the greatest movie in the universe, but if you leave this world for the next without having seen it at least once, your experience won’t quite have been the same. Because whether you like it or not, in the infinite reaches of the cosmos there’s nothing out there quite like it.
