There’s a huge inter­est in Japan­ese manga and animé in the us, but it’s rare for an animé fea­ture film to get a the­atri­cal release. From the name and poster alone (indeed, what caught my own inter­est), one might not even guess Paprika is foreign-language, let alone animé. Animé is a medium, not a genre, but it does have a cer­tain pop­u­lar per­cep­tion in the US: either the apoc­a­lyp­tic sci-fi of Akira or the fairy tale fan­ta­sia of Spir­ited Away. And that’s not even tak­ing into account the expec­ta­tions of a gen­er­a­tion of kids that grew up watch­ing the dubbed Robot­ech and Star Blaz­ers seri­als (which would be exem­pli­fied by… me).

The pop­u­lar per­cep­tion is not wrong; I’m not an animé expert, but Paprika has sev­eral of the super­fi­cial trap­pings: cyber­netic tech­nol­ogy (like Ghost in the Shell), a ghost­like female crea­ture (like direc­tor Satoshi Kon’s ear­lier Mil­len­nium Actress), and an expo­nen­tially grow­ing world-eating beast (like Akira and America’s own The Blob). But what sets Paprika apart is its psy­che­delic imagery, adult themes, and sheer weirdness.

Val­ley of the Dolls

Like Blade Run­ner, it’s equal parts detec­tive story and sci­ence fic­tion, with a splash of hor­ror. The mys­tery genre pro­vides a struc­ture for the nom­i­nal plot: Paprika is the dream alter ego of Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a dream researcher build­ing a machine for use in psy­cho­an­a­lytic dream analy­sis. The device they’re build­ing is called the “DC Mini”, a name which, every sin­gle time, made this Dork Reporter think of DC Comics minis­eries. Chiba’s Blade Run­ner–esque mis­sion is to track down three miss­ing DC Mini devices, and their co-creator.

I hate it when that happens

Paprika even shares a theme with Blade Run­ner: the moral reper­cus­sions of new tech­nolo­gies. If dreams are a kind of “place”, and can be a shared real­ity (like the world of The Dream­ing in Neil Gamain’s Sand­man comic book series), what is the dif­fer­ence between it and real life? The poten­tial of one world bleed­ing into another is very lit­er­ally dan­ger­ous. One of the film’s vil­lains uses the dream real­ity to com­mit a very dis­turb­ing form of rape, and another goes so far as to label the tech­nol­ogy a poten­tial form of ter­ror­ism: “Implant­ing dreams into other people’s heads is ter­ror­ism.” This is not hyper­bole in the film’s uni­verse: the city is almost destroyed by dreams.

Two final lit­tle things:

• What’s the deal with the name? Is it a trans­la­tion issue, or some­thing about Japan­ese cul­ture (or cui­sine) I’m not aware of? A metaphor of spices and recipes is used at one point, but it still seems oddly random.
• A key char­ac­ter is movie-obsessed cop, an ama­teur film­maker in his youth. His noirish dreams only fur­ther expand the Blade Run­ner par­al­lels. Paprika explic­itly equates movie watch­ing with dreams and memory.

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Offi­cial movie site: www.paprikamovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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