When Everything Seems Like the Movies

Have movies shaped our dreams as much as dreams have shaped the movies? Before movies came out, did people dream as cinematically as they do now?

Satoshi Kon's new film, Paprika, brings these questions to mind. In this science fiction movie, researchers have developed psychotherapy machines, the most advanced of which enables them to not only visually record dreams, but to enter them. The repressed scientist Dr. Atsko dives into other people's dreams, where she becomes her alter ego, Paprika, who is as adventurous, uninhibited and flirtatious as Atsko is reserved. The problems start when the technology is misused -- threatening reality itself.






Among the many themes this smart movie explores is the connection between movies and dreams -- particularly for one of Dr. Atsko's clients, a police detective who professes to hate movies, yet has recurring dreams that conjure images from "Roman Holiday," "The Greatest Show on Earth," "Tarzan," and "From Russia With Love." It's an apt subject for Kon, who showed his fascination for movies in the Hitchcockian psychological thriller "Perfect Blue" and the John Ford tribute "Tokyo Godfathers," among other movies.

The art style of the lush animation also played into the theme. The characters were rendered in a stylized-realism form, incorporating slight caricature, reminiscent of American comic books -- themselves highly influenced by (and in turn influencing) cinematic storytelling.

The Internet also plays a strong part in the movie. The film points out that the Web often serves the same purposes as dreams -- providing us with an emotional outlet, or a place where we can become other people in a dreamscape.

I don't want to give the impression that "Paprika" is a philosophical snore-fest. Instead, it's a fast-paced action film, which uses animation to play with shifting perspectives and fantastic visuals, to illustrate dreams and what happens when dreams and reality collide.

We saw "Paprika" with friends in the new Landmark cinema, which had just opened the day before. It turned out an apt venue. Several of the scenes in "Paprika" take place in movie theatres, and the characters are often shown in darkened theatres watching other scenes unfolding on the screen. At moments like those, the line between reality and the animated world on the other side of the screen seemed to blur.

"Paprika," like several of Kon's films, is a perfect answer to those who believe that intelligent, mature stories cannot be told in animation -- or that Japanese anime consists solely of game merchandising, giant robots and porn.