Paprika

Today I watched a film called Paprika, directed by my favourite anime director: Satoshi Kon. It did not disappoint!

I'm starting to wonder if he's a bit of a one trick pony though, Paprika being another film exploring dreams & reality and what happens when the lines between them are blurred. However whilst the blurring in Perfect Blue is caused by extreme paranoia & mental health issues, and Millennium Actress uses it as a brilliant device to explore the main characters memories, Paprika does it in a much more literal sense with the film centering around a device that lets you join in with other peoples dreams. I wont say anything else about the plot, as with Satoshi Kon films, half the joy is finding out / working out what's going on.

This was my first anime on blu-ray and it's a fantastic film for the format. The animation was crisp and fluid, and all the colours in the dream sequences especially were fantastic. The soundtrack is really excellent, and though I wasn't able to test the full uncompressed audio (guess my amp doesn't support it) the standard 5.1 was really good.

I'd definitely recommend Paprika to everyone. It's so much easier to follow than Perfect Blue making it much more accessible, and is more fantastical & action-packed than Millennium Actress (which is still my favourite film of all time though). I've just got Paranoia Agent to see now. Will be interesting to see what he does when directing a series instead of a film. Hopefully it wont be too incomprehensible. :)