Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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.

I remained as spellbound during the third disc of Mushi-shi as I did for the first two. Isn’t it around this point in the lifecycle (as it were) of most any anime series that things begin to drop off? Not here. This show is inexhaustibly fascinating.

In my earlier reviews for this series, I mentioned how this is a story about an ecosystem — about the cycle of life and death within a world. The closest thing we have to a protagonist in the show, the wandering and taciturn mushi-master named Ginko, has been quite deliberately kept at arm’s length from us. The show wasn’t really about his personality, but about the world he walked through and did his best to understand and help people cope with.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.