Paprika (2006)
| director: | Satoshi Kon |
| release-year: | 2006 |
| genres: | animation, anime, scifi |
| countries: | Japan |
| languages: | Japanese |
A ludicrously fat guy, who they call a genius man-child, has invented a sci-fi device for hopping into other people's dreams.
The research lab has secretly allowed his female coworker to use the device to perform psychoanalysis on people with repressed trauma. She has been entering a local police detective's dreams to help him sort through his troubles. In dreams, she has a manic pixie dream girl alter ego: Paprika.
All of the prototype devices are stolen. They blame it on a terrorist group, and make up a bunch of technobabble mumbo jumbo to explain how terrorists could use it for great evil. Don't get too caught up trying to understand what they're talking about. All that matters is dreams, man.
The chairman of the research lab pulls the plug on the project, claiming that it's too dangerous, but dreams and reality start merging and the lab techs all violate orders to investigate what's going on and try to track down the missing devices.
Their investigation is ill-fated, of course, and we have dreams-within-dreams and dreams-within-reality and reality-within-dreams and who is awake and what is a dream and so forth. Inception meets The Matrix meets Brainscan.
Everybody's dream is merging into one mega-dream, with a large, loud parade of possibly-evil children's toys at the center of it all. The lab techs keep popping into the pile of children's toys to try to find each other and/or figure out who is in charge.
Like any all-is-dream story, when anything is possible and rules are undefined, anything can suddenly deus ex machina them out of trouble and it's impossible to build any stakes. That is also Paprika's main problem: it's all very interesting, but nothing matters. It's surreal enough to put that aside and just enjoy the flashing colors, though.
It's a true-to-form Japanese anime, complete with all of the toppings: overt sexualization of minors, tentacles penetrating human orifices, giant exploding blob creatures, and a mega-sized monster stomping on Tokyo.
They throw in an absolutely bonkers love story, which starts and ends right in the middle of the mega-boss-fight climax. I'm not complaining, mind you; this is like the anime version of Crank. If you get bored, just try waiting ten seconds for the next dive into madness.
