Paprika

TL;DR: This is a good, albeit slightly weird, watch about dreams, reality, and the meaning of personal freedom. Yet another avant-garde Japanese animated film for your viewing pleasure. Avant-garde seems to be the name of the game when it comes to animated movies by Japanese filmmakers. This is the fourth (I think?) that I've watched, coming off the back of films like Akira and Perfect Blue, and like those films, Paprika does a good job of communicating something profound with its unsettling imagery and unconventional storytelling. Apparently this film inspired Inception, which I haven't watched yet, but a Nolan marathon is due so maybe I'll see the parallels there 👀 This film has a lot to say, but for me, I think it boils down to the whole psychoanalysis thing with the idea that people's deepest desires, fears, and vices become realised in the dreamscape. Atsuko switches to Paprika in her dreams — or, as Paprika pointed out, perhaps it's that Paprika has to switch to Atsuko when she awakens — because she struggles to remain true to herself in the real world. Konakawa is troubled by dreams of the criminal that he's trying to catch, and his dreams of the movie theatres and the repetition of the number 17 help to put him on the right track. In relation to dreaming at least, psychoanalysis is widely considered a pseudoscience, but this film is still an interesting outlook on what might happen if it were true and dream interpretation went as far as it does here. Aside from this, two other things that I found interesting was the common descriptions of Dr Tokita as a child, and what the chairman believes about dreams. I've always thought that being a genius does require an infinite amount of childlike curiosity, but here, the downside of this is pointed out, as Tokita's naive belief in the beauty of sharing a dream with another has led to the incidents of the film. As we see, he himself did have a dream (not the sleeping kind) — the realisation of the DC Mini (is DC meant to stand for Dream Catcher?), but as he shares in Himuro's dream, it seems that he begins to understand that not everyone may share his outlook. Meanwhile, the chairman has some pretty interesting things to say: “Science is nothing but a piece of trash before a profound dream.” “In a world of inhumane reality it is the only humane sanctuary left. That is a dream.” It seems that the chairman has become so obsessed with his dream (of walking again?) that he holds dreams as sacred, believing that the path to freedom is to merge the dreamscape with reality. However, as we eventually see, Paprika literally and figuratively "eats" his dream, simultaneously restoring reality to how it should be and emphasising that freedom is found in accepting yourself for who you are, which she does by finally admitting her love for Tokita. For the plot's sake, this did seem a bit shoehorned in — I didn't really see any sign of her being in love with Tokita at all. If anything, I thought that she was being honest about how she felt about him when she scolded him for his naivety — but then again, the fact that she went for personal attack could just be a sign that it wasn't her true self talking. Either way, this was quite good, and definitely worth watching at least once