Paprika (2006 film)
Paprika is a 2006 Japanese science-fiction psychological thriller anime film co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon, based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1993 novel of the same name, about a research psychologist who uses a device that permits therapists to help patients by entering their dreams. It is Kon's fourth and final feature film before his death in 2010. The film stars the voices of Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Tōru Furuya, Akio Ōtsuka, Kōichi Yamadera, and Hideyuki Tanaka.
Kon and Seishi Minakami wrote the script, and Japanese animation studio Madhouse animated and produced the film alongside Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan, which distributed it in Japan. The score was composed by Susumu Hirasawa. The film received wide acclaim from critics. Sony Pictures via Sony Pictures Classics distributed the film in the United States, where it received a limited release.
Plot
In the near future, a device called the "DC Mini" allows the user to view people's dreams. The head of the team working on this treatment, Doctor Atsuko Chiba, begins using the machine illegally to help psychiatric patients outside of the research facility, using her alter-ego "Paprika", a persona she assumes in the dream world. Chiba's closest allies are Doctor Toratarō Shima, the chief of the department, and Doctor Kōsaku Tokita, an obese, genius man-child and inventor of the DC Mini.Paprika counsels Detective Toshimi Konakawa, who is plagued by a recurring dream. She gives Konakawa a card with the name of a website on it. Because they are unfinished prototypes, the DC Minis lack access restrictions, allowing anyone to enter another person's dreams, which poses grave consequences when they are stolen. Shima goes on a nonsensical tirade and jumps through a window, nearly killing himself. Upon examining Shima's dream, which is a parade of random objects, Tokita recognizes his assistant, Kei Himuro, which confirms their suspicion that the theft was an inside job.
After two other scientists fall victim to the DC Mini, the chairman of the company, Doctor Seijirō Inui, who was against the project to begin with, bans the use of the device. This fails to hinder the crazed parade, now in Himuro's dream, which claims Tokita. Paprika and Shima find that Himuro is only an empty shell. The real culprit is Inui, who believes that he must protect dreams from mankind's influence through dream therapy, with the help of Doctor Morio Osanai.
Paprika is captured by the pair after an exhausting chase. Osanai admits his love for Chiba and peels away Paprika's skin to reveal Chiba underneath. However, he is interrupted by the outraged Inui who demands that they finish off Chiba; as the two share Osanai's body, they battle for control. Konakawa enters the dream and flees with Chiba back into his own recurring dream. Osanai gives chase, which ends in Konakawa shooting Osanai to take control of the dream. The act kills Osanai's physical body in the real world.
Dreams and reality begin to merge. The dream parade runs amok in the city, and reality starts to unravel. Shima is nearly killed by a giant Japanese doll, but is saved by Paprika, who has become separate from Chiba. Amidst the chaos, Tokita, in the form of a giant robot, eats Chiba and prepares to do the same to Paprika. A ghostly apparition of Chiba appears and reveals that she has been in love with Tokita and has been repressing these emotions. She comes to terms with her repressed desires, reconciling herself with the part of her that is Paprika. Inui returns in the form of a giant humanoid nightmare, reveals his twisted dreams of omnipotence, and threatens to darken the world with his delusions. Paprika throws herself into Tokita's body. A baby emerges from the robotic shell and consumes Inui, aging into a fully-grown combination of Chiba and Paprika as she does so, then fades away, ending the nightmare.
In the final scene, Chiba sits at Tokita's bedside as he wakes up. Later, Konakawa visits the website from Paprika's card and receives a message from Paprika: "Atsuko will change her surname to Tokita...and I suggest watching the movie Dreaming Kids." Konakawa enters a movie theatre and purchases a ticket for Dreaming Kids.
Voice cast
- Megumi Hayashibara as Doctor Atsuko Chiba, an attractive and modest psychiatrist and researcher at the Institute for Psychiatric Research. She uses the DC Mini to treat her clients inside their dreams under the guise of her alter ego Paprika. Chiba is voiced by Cindy Robinson in the English dub.
- Tōru Furuya as Doctor Kōsaku Tokita, an obese child-at-heart genius and the inventor of the DC Mini. He is Chiba's closest ally, although she often treats him coldly. Tokita often calls Chiba "Atsu-chan" as a symbol of affection. Tokita is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal in the English dub.
- Tōru Emori as Doctor Seijirō Inui, the wheelchair-bound chairman of the Institute for Psychiatric Research who calls himself the "protector of the dreamworld" but is in fact using the DC Mini for his own nefarious purposes, seemingly interested in using it to regain mobility as well as power. Inui is voiced by Michael Forest in the English dub.
- Katsunosuke Hori as Doctor Toratarō Shima, the cheerful and friendly chief of staff at the Institute for Psychiatric Research and an ally of Atsuko Chiba. Shima is voiced by David Lodge in the English dub.
- Akio Ōtsuka as Detective Toshimi Konakawa, a friend of Shima and a client of Paprika. He is haunted by a recurring dream that stems from an anxiety neurosis. He is infatuated with Paprika. Konakawa is voiced by Paul St. Peter in the English dub.
- Hideyuki Tanaka as Guy.
- Kōichi Yamadera as Doctor Morio Osanai, a researcher and colleague of Atsuko Chiba who in reality is helping Inui in his evil plans. He is obsessively in love with Chiba. Osanai is voiced by Doug Erholtz in the English dub.
- Satomi Kōrogi as a Japanese doll that reappears throughout the story.
- Daisuke Sakaguchi as Kei Himuro, a friend of Tokita and a suspect in the theft of the DC Mini.
- Mitsuo Iwata as Doctor Yasushi Tsumura.
- Rikako Aikawa as Doctor Nobue Kakimoto, two scientists who fall victim to the DC Mini thief.
- Yasutaka Tsutsui the author of the novel the film is based on as Kuga.
- Satoshi Kon, the director, as Jinnai, two bartenders who befriend Konakawa.
Music
The soundtrack is notable for being one of the first film scores to use Vocaloid for vocals. It's also the last of Hirasawa's albums where an Amiga computer was used for composition. All MIDI was sequenced through an Amiga 4000 running the Bars n Pipes program.
Release
Festivals
Paprika premiered on 2 September 2006, at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. It screened at the 44th New York Film Festival, playing on 7 October 2006. It competed at the 19th Tokyo International Film Festival 21–29 October 2006, as the opening screening for the 2006 TIFF Animation CG Festival. It also competed in 27th Fantasporto from 23 February to 3 March 2007. Paprika was shown at the 2007 National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C., as the closing film of the Anime Marathon at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian, and at the 2007 Greater Philadelphia Cherry Blossom Festival. It played at the Sarasota Film Festival on 21 April 2007, in Sarasota, Florida. Additionally, it was shown at the 39th International Film Festival in Auckland, New Zealand, on 22 July 2007, and was shown as the festival travelled around New Zealand.Box office
In the United States, the film received a limited release in 2007, with Sony Pictures distributing the film. It grossed $882,267 in the United States. In other territories, the film grossed $62,648 in Singapore, Italy and South Korea as of 2007, for an overseas total of $944,915 outside of Japan.Reception
Critical reception
Paprika has received positive reviews from film critics. It holds an 84% "Certified Fresh" approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 90 reviews, with an average rating of 7.29/10 and the consensus reading, "Following its own brand of logic, Paprika is an eye-opening mind trip that is difficult to follow but never fails to dazzle." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score, rated the film 81 out of 100 based on 26 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Paprika won the Best Feature Length Theatrical Anime Award at the sixth-annual Tokyo Anime Awards during the 2007 Tokyo International Anime Fair.Andrez Bergen of Yomiuri Shimbun praised the Paprika as the "most mesmerizing animation long-player since Miyazaki's Spirited Away five years ago". He also praised the film's animation and backgrounds. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle gave it a positive review, saying that the film is a "sophisticated work of the imagination" and "challenging and disturbing and uncanny in the ways it captures the nature of dreams". LaSalle later went on to say that the film is a "unique and superior achievement." Rob Nelson of The Village Voice praised the film for its visuals. However, he complained about the plot, saying that Paprika is not "a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced - or maybe dreamed." Nelson later went on to say that Kon "maintains a charming faith in cinema's ability to seduce fearless new audiences, even one viewer at a time." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times said that the film has a "sense of unease about the rapidly changing relationship between our physical selves and our machines." Dargis praised Kon for his direction, saying that he "shows us the dark side of the imaginative world in Paprika that he himself has perceptively brightened." Helen McCarthy in 500 Essential Anime Movies said that Paprika "proves once again that the great science fiction doesn't rely on giant robots and alien worlds".
Conversely, Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel gave a negative review, saying "With a conventional invade-dreams/bend-reality plot, it's a bit of a bore. It's not as dreamlike and mesmerizing as Richard Linklater's rotoscope-animation Waking Life, less fanciful than the Oscar-winning anime Spirited Away." Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle said the film "is as trippy as a Jefferson Airplane light show" and criticized the characters and the dialogue.
The Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood praised Paprika in an interview, stating, "That movie blew my mind, too. That also pushed the envelope of what animation is, and it was kind of almost like a total mind-head trip, that film, from a visual stand point." Time magazine included it in its top 25 animated films of all time, while Time Out also included the film in its list of top 50 animated films of all time. Rotten Tomatoes included it in its list of fifty best animated films of all time. Newsweek Japan included Paprika in its list of the 100 best films of all time, while the American edition of Newsweek included it among its top twenty films of 2007. Metacritic has listed the film among the top 25 highest-rated science fiction films of all time, and the top 30 highest-rated animations of all time.
Awards and nominations
Paprika received the following awards and nominations:| Year | Award | Category | Recipient | Result |
| 2006 | Montréal Festival of New Cinema | Public's Choice Award | Satoshi Kon | |
| 2006 | 63rd Venice International Film Festival | Golden Lion | Satoshi Kon | |
| 2007 | Fantasporto | Critics Choice Award | Satoshi Kon | |
| 2007 | Newport Beach Film Festival | Feature Film Award for Best Animation | Satoshi Kon | |
| 2007 | Online Film Critics Society Awards | Best Animated Film |