Paprika film review

Paprika film review

Paprika is an animation directed by the famed Japanese director Satoshi Kon, a young star in the Japanese anime industry. It is an animation based round a device called the DC-Mini which allows its users to enter the dreams of others and a mysterious girl named Paprika who used the device to help people understand problems that they are having in their day-to-day lives. When the DC-Mini is stolen all hell breaks loose as an unknown third party starts causing havoc with this experimental and very powerful machine.

Paprika is a masterpiece of what animation can do with a complex and visually rich story. Director Satoshi Kon is well-known for his commentary on the social condition of our modern world, but it is not just in the stories he tells but the dynamic visual nature in which he does this and Paprika is no exception. Without this visual flair this story and animation would not work as well and could easily be unreadable or unfilmable.

Accordingly, Satoshi’s visual expertise brings such a complicated subject matter of the subconscious mind to life and to a visually understandable world using brilliant transitions and just downright surreal visuals. Satoshi Kon has managed to create a film which answers and creates so many questions and ideas in a frenzied and fast paced experience.

With this in mind, watching Paprika is like stepping into a dream; it makes viewers feel, as though they were entering and traveling through a world as if they were in a dream. Although this highly sophisticated and visually immersive style and content can leave the viewer scratching their head sometimes, this film is a must watch. In the fact it is just refreshing and bold even if you do not get some of the complexities of the stories the visual roller coaster in which we are taken on is well worth it, as anyone can appreciate a work of pure genius and originality. This film is such a masterpiece as it is cited as the inspiration of Christopher Nolan's masterpiece, Inception.

This film tries to cover the same subject matter, but has not got the clear readability that the animation medium has given this film. As an animation, this film is allowed to take some liberties with disbelief, for as a viewer, we become more open to the impossible when we are shown something unrealistic through the art of animation, compared to films, which unless the world states, . Whereas in Paprika the audience does not question, instead we simply watch and are inspired by what we are shown to question these very ideas.

Paprika is a film that is easily a ten out of ten and should be displayed in the archives and on  the walls of museums as an example of what animation and film are and what animation and film can be. It is visually pleasing whilst well timed; the editing is that of a master and the plot is that of the greats, asking such philosophical questions that the laymen among us should be given an instruction guide just to follow along. This film is both bold and edgy and shows how much of a powerhouse Japan’s animation industry is.