A grotesque parade of dolls, household appliances, and stuffed
animals bustles through the city streets, turning everyone in its path
into dream monsters. People dive in and out of paintings, billboards
and movie screens. Girls sprout wings, only to be sucked into the
ocean’s depths and erupt once again from the water as mermaids.
Welcome to the maddeningly wonderful world of Satoshi Kon’s
Paprika, the latest production from the man who gave us the reality-twisting head games of
Perfect Blue,
Millennium Actress and the masterful
Paranoia Agent.
Paprika has elements of each one, come to think of it: the dual-personality psychosis of
Perfect Blue, the world-as-nightmare and nightmare-as-world of
Paranoia Agent, and the life-as-cinema and cinema-as-life of
Millennium Actress. And now we have
Paprika, a story of life-as-a-dream and dreaming-as-a-way-of-life, and it’s every bit as much a masterwork as his other productions.
Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.
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Thanks for the heads-up about the French LE; I do read French, so if it's in that language I could probably puzzle through it without much trouble. What I've heard about ...Time has actually been mixed -- the one review I read in detail made it sound like they were not really taking full advantage of the possibilities brought up by the story. But it's been on my to-see list as soon as it comes out domestically.
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I finally got this movie yesterday, it was amazing. I love Satoshi Kon and this is now one of my favourites by him.
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I highly recommend checking out the R2 French LE - includes a 700 page book (although sadly untranslated), and beautiful case. Also, it may already be OOP, but everyone deserves to see the beautiful R3 Korea LE of "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time". Saw this one in the theater in Singapore (a couple days after I watched Paprika) -- definitely of the best theatrical anime I've seen in a few years -- even better than Paprika overall I'd say.
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Sadly IIRC -- mostly from twitchfilm.net and the forums there - the book is all in Japanese (even in the French LE) -- then again, IIRC, you also read manga straight-up, so it's probably not an issue there either. There're some good threads running in the forums there with different SE images as well - you might like to check out some of them, as well as some good discussions and reviews.
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I can't wait to buy this movie, Paprkia was the second best Anime movie I saw this year (next to 5 Centimeters Per Second). I was very apprehensive going in to this movie but I was so relieved at the end, Satoshi Kon didn't disappoint again, he's truly one of the best anime Directors out there today.
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