Dream Theater by Aldrin Calimlim Paprika...

Paprika (2006)
D: Satoshi Kon
S: Megumi Hayashibara, Katsunosuke Hori, Tōru Furuya

One might be forgiven for accusing Christopher Nolan of stealing much of the dream logic that governs Satoshi Kon’s fantastical film, Paprika, and using it as the underlying conceit of his latest blockbuster, Inception, which Paprika predates by no more than four years. While Nolan, speaking in promotional interviews and contributing to production notes, seems to have never seen Kon’s animated feature, both films curiously share a good number of props and elements in common: collapsing nightmares, subconscious detectives, repressed hopes, shattered images, maddening anxieties, and most important, communal and multileveled dreams.

Like most motion pictures done in the manner of anime, Paprika is set in the vaguely foreseeable future. Joint advances in electronics engineering and psychotherapy have led to the invention and further development of a device that lets physicians enter the dreams of their patients and, subconsciously, gradually rid them of their psychic tensions and maladjustments. Known as the “DC Mini” and touted to represent “the hope that shines on the new horizons of psychiatric treatment,” this device is yet to be legally approved and mass-produced (only four prototypes are currently in use) and only a handful of persons, including Dr. Torataro Shima, the wise old chief of laboratory, and Dr. Kosaku Tokita, the obese and child-at-heart genius inventor of the DC Mini, have access to its capacity and proper knowledge of its operation. Foremost among this exclusive group of scientists, though, is Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a beautiful psychotherapist whose technique of treating patients involves infiltrating their dreams while assuming the persona of her younger dreamworld alter-ego, Paprika.

Paprika is quite literally the proverbial “girl of one’s dreams” to many of the patients whose dreams she penetrates. She might also be a minor, if also a bit too literal, example of a “manic pixie dream girl” since she, in a rather twisted sense, teaches patients—to borrow a portion of the definition of said type of character by film critic Nathan Rabin—“to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Attractive, affable, and astute, she sports a flaming mop of hair and a lively disposition that recall her namesake condiment. In a dream shared with Paprika, one is, more often than not, hard-pressed to hold out against her well-intentioned suggestions.

It’s this combination of intelligence and charm that is put to the test when one of the DC Minis is stolen. In the hands of dutiful and professionally trained individuals like Atsuko, the DC Mini proves to be a valuable instrument in helping patients overcome their psychological problems, but in the hands of corrupt and technologically savvy terrorists, it becomes a lethal weapon capable of manipulating the dreams of other people. Before long, Shima is driven to insanity by a strange “daydream” and attempts to commit suicide and Tokita gets trapped in an equally strange dream and adopts the body of a toy robot. It’s up to Atsuko/Paprika to catch the thief, reestablish the line separating dreams and reality, and save the world, preferably before bedtime.

If this sounds dizzying and nonsensical, it’s because it is at first. Paprika, based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 landmark science fiction novel and adapted and directed as it was by the virtuosic Kon, is suffused with numerous incongruities that stress the film’s central battle between order and chaos and, oddly enough, emphasize the possibility of finding meaning in the mundane. Here a surreal parade of supposedly inanimate objects, such as a refrigerator, a fire hydrant, and a replica of the Statue of Liberty, among many others, now mobile as though bipedal, is a frequent occurrence. So is the haunting image of a violent but poker-faced Japanese doll. So is the suggestion that dreams are no different from cinema and the Internet in their treatment of people’s repressions. And so are incoherent sentences like “The sign is good fortune. The ceiling fan brings a message releasing epithets,” and “The dense forest turns into a shopping district. The 24-bit eggplant will be analyzed,” enthusiastically announced by characters whose dreams are invaded and comically reminiscent of the similarly disruptive and perplexing one-liners in Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel, White Noise, which, incidentally, also deals with how people absorb and process information. With Paprika, Kon reminds his audience that words and symbols, whether encountered in the distorted planes of dreams or in the broad daylight of reality, as well as icons, personal and political both, are more than capable of defining—and destroying—a person.

Paprika echoes most of the themes Kon cultivated in his previous films. In its essaying of the precariousness of a double life and the merging of fact and fiction, it closely resembles his directorial debut film, Perfect Blue, and his follow-up, Millennium Actress. To a lesser extent, its strange milieus parallel the idiosyncrasies of the characters in Tokyo Godfathers. But to compare Paprika with Nolan’s Inception, which in hindsight is nothing more than a set of five action/fantasy/adventure films cleverly interlaced to transmit a semblance of functional harmony and reduce their individual levels of stridency, in order to get a handle on this wildly imaginative animated film’s flair and exuberance is to do the late visionary director and his work a mild disservice. Paprika is in a league of its own. It is a truly bravura cinematic creation, a Mobius stream of (sub)consciousness, a landscape where truth and reason are found nowhere and everywhere.