Satoshi Kon: Paprika (2006)

Paprika is Satoshi Kon’s biggest and most ambitious film. It is also his last. He never made another feature before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2010, and so Paprika’s joyful vision of the power of movies plays as not only his definitive statement as a filmmaker, but also his parting message. Thus, it’s easy to think of Paprika as Kon’s opus, a majestically entertaining film that coalesces his vision of dreamwords, filmmaking, and artistic expression into one unified whole.

While his previous films, Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, conjure surreal dream states on the screen, Paprika explicitly deals with dreams within its narrative. It follows an experimental psychiatrist, Dr. Atsuko Chiba, who is helping pioneer the development of the DC Mini, a device that allows therapists to view and even enter patients’ dreams. While still in testing, the DC Mini has an access flaw that allows anyone to enter the dreams of anyone else connected to the system. This spirals out of control when Dr. Shima, an associate of Chiba’s, goes on a psychotic rampage and jumps out of a window, almost killing himself, while believing he’s in a dream. Chiba realizes the security flaws in the system and works with the DC Mini’s developer, the obese man-child Dr. Tokita, to figure out who is abusing the system.

Since dreams can invade reality in Paprika, the viewer becomes suspect of the reality of any given scene throughout the film. Kon mines this surreal possibility for all its worth. He has scenes bleed into each other, with reality quickly turning into a dream and back again before the viewer can get their bearings. His narrative set-up has no built-in boundaries, and thus, there are no boundaries to Kon’s imaginative visuals. Kon demonstrates a surreal vision of the dreamworld in the central, shared dream that infects many people throughout the film. The dream shows a massive parade of ornamented figures and objects dancing to a hypnotic beat. The parade is led by a refrigerator and features iconography from Japanese history and pop culture, from cartoonish torii gates to Buddhist idols and Japanese pop stars. It’s a fascinating, bizarre image that appears throughout the film, with Susumu Hirsawa’s carnivalesque, electronic music amplifying the chaotic energy of the moment.

The film begins with a less ambitious dream sequence that’s no less surreal. While developing the DC Mini, Chiba also moonlights as a dream therapist going under the alter ego of Paprika, a spritely red-headed action hero that appears in the dreams alongside her patients. At the beginning of the film, Chiba is treating Detective Konakawa, who is terrorized by a recurring dream related to a homicide he’s investigating. We watch Konakawa’s dream of a criminal investigation at a circus morph into various movie recreations before arriving in a hallway, where the murder victim falls to the ground in slow motion while the murderer escapes through a glowing door at the end of the hall. The image of the victim falling to the ground is haunting. The victim is perpetually falling, never reaching the ground, with the face always out of view; Konakawa’s dream has frozen the victim in his moment of death. The image torments Konakawa and triggers trauma from his past.

Kon is interested in dreaming on its own terms, but also as a metaphor for filmmaking. It’s no surprise that Kon is fascinated with exploring filmmaking within his work; Perfect Blue explores filmmaking as exploitation while Millennium Actress explores the dynamic between both actors and movies and viewers and movies. Paprika continues along the same lines of Millennium Actress, depicting movies as a shared dream experience. 

Such an approach draws obvious connections to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which came out four years after Paprika and seems to draw inspiration from it, possibly inadvertently. For one, both films portray the act of dreaming as something akin to living inside a movie. There is a dreamer that shapes the dream and other observers that experience that dream; one stands in for the director, the other for the viewer. There are also similar rules to dreams within both films. In the opening sequence of Paprika, Konakawa’s subconscious turns on him and attacks him, similar to how the subconscious attacks Ellen Page’s Adriadne in the Paris dreams of Inception. Perhaps most notably, Nolan seems to steal the concept of an elevator between dream levels from Paprika. At one point, Paprika takes Konakawa on an elevator through his own memories, with each level connecting to a different dream resembling a different movie genre, before landing on the hallway with the victim falling to the ground, the source of his trauma. In Inception, Ariadne discovers that Cobb has a similar elevator to his own dreams where he keeps a recreation of his dead wife, Mal. While it’s impossible to verify whether Christopher Nolan was directly inspired by the visual concepts of Paprika, the connections between the films remain uncanny.

In spite of the close conceptual and visual connections between Paprika and Inception, Paprika’s exploration of dreams as movies bears significant differences. While Inception explores filmmaking through metaphor, Paprika is more confident in addressing the connection between dreams and movies head-on within the narrative. In Konakawa’s recurring dream, we see him switch between characters from various movies. In one moment, he’s Tarzan swinging from the trees before the dream morphs into the train fight between James Bond and Red Grant in From Russia with Love, with Konakawa in the Bond role. After that, the dream shifts into the riverside dance scene in Roman Holiday, with Konakawa as Gregory Peck’s photographer/journalist.

Chiba (as Paprika) even addresses the cinematic quality to Konakawa’s dream in her therapy. She compares smaller nightmares to short films and his recurring nightmare to a blockbuster. We see Konakawa’s recurring dream three times throughout the film, with no variations to the actual dream images, but changes to the way we contextual the moments. After the second occurence, characters criticize the dream on filmmaking terms for crossing the axis and for shooting in an exposure inappropriate to the film format. Chiba asks Konakawa what the terms mean and in a movie theatre within his dream world, he explains to her the concept of crossing the line of axis and how exposure determines film look. As Konakawa explains these concepts, Kon demonstrates them with the filmmaking, crossing the axis during reverse shots and suddenly oversaturating the colours of the animation. Most hilariously, Konakawa is dressed as Akira Kurosawa, with his iconic sunglasses and hat, during the scene.

The meta-commentary about dreams and movies highlights the intimate connection between the two things, but also serves to demonstrate the importance of movies to Konakawa as a character. Movies are at the root of his trauma. By exploring this dramatic avenue throughout the film, Kon posits that not only are movies acts of collective dreaming, but they’re also therapeutic acts of artistry. 

As Chiba explores Konakawa’s fears, she learns that he used to want to be a filmmaker. Along with his best friend, he made a film about two friends that had ended up on opposite sides of the law. One was a cop, the other a thief, and the entire film showed the cop chasing the crook, while exploring their shared past in flashbacks. The film ended with the cop choosing whether to shoot the crook as he flees down a hallway—an image nearly identical to Konakawa’s dream. Konakawa never finished the film or resolved the dramatic scenario because his friend was tragically killed before he could do so. Thus, Konakawa grew to hate movies because of the loss of his friend and became a cop, but the current homicide case forces him to confront his unresolved trauma related to that loss.

By putting Konakawa’s trauma front-and-centre in the film’s emotional conflict, Kon is showing the potential for films to help people work through trauma. Movies are at the root of Konakawa’s pain, but they also offer him the means for liberation. Chiba uses the DC Mini to recreate his experiences through dreams, like little therapeutic movies, and forces him to relive his traumatic situation until he can overcome it. Kon depicts this overcoming as Konakawa choosing to shoot the murderer at the end of the hallway. The action even comes with a triumphant end title screen with Konakawa heroically posing alongside Paprika, as if the movie of his trauma has ended with happily-ever-after. Thus, movies allow Konakawa to overcome his pain and find new purpose in his life. They fulfill him.

If we treat the dreams throughout Paprika as a metaphor for movies, then movies become a means of empowerment for the other characters as well. This is most obvious in Chiba, who is a reserved, buttondown doctor in real life, but the free-spirited, red-haired action hero Paprika in the dream world. Movies (through dreams) offer her liberation and the chance to express herself fully. This comes out through her relationship to Dr. Tokita, who is brilliant but childish. Chiba has romantic feelings for him, but isn’t able to express those feelings in reality until she’s comfortable expressing them in her dream. She creates a narrative that lets her act out her desires safely and that narrative allows her to act them out in real life with no fear of repercussion.

In a way, Paprika is essentially a grand exercise in narrative therapy. It shows how movies resemble dreams and how dreams are essential to understanding our subconscious and the trauma that is often buried within it. It demonstrates that by unlocking the imaginative possibility of dreams through movies, individuals can overcome their fears and become empowered. Thus, Paprika is all about the liberating power of the movies. There’s no accident that it ends on an image of Konakawa heading back to the movies, his imagination rekindled after years of repression related to trauma. This final image is Kon’s joyous closing statement, an accidental farewell that contains everything you need to know about his love of cinema. It’s a bittersweet closing when we know that Kon never made another feature film, but incredibly fitting for a career that celebrated and embodied the best of the movies at every turn.

9 out of 10

Paprika (2006, Japan)

Directed by Satoshi Kon; written by Seishi Minakami and Satoshi Kon, based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui; starring Megumi Hayashibara, Toru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Toru Furuya, Akio Otsuka, Koichi Yamadera, Hideyuki Tanaka.

Related Posts