Satoshi Kon, RIP
Aug. 25th, 2010 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSad news this morning that anime director Satoshi Kon has died at 46. His 2006 movie Paprika is one of my favorite science fiction movies of recent years. It got me to track down is 13-episode TV series, Paranoia Agent (Môsô dairinin, 2004), which I also liked a lot. I was less fond of Millennium Actress (Sennen joyû, 2001).
I've seen a couple of people writing that Inception clearly took some inspiration from Paprika, but I really don't see that at all. While they share the idea of a machine that allows one person to enter another person's dream, this idea goes back much further than Paprika -- c.f. Zelazny's "He Who Shapes" (1965), and I'm guessing it goes back even further than that. Paprika is also about the irrationality of dreams, which is the opposite of Inception, where the dreams don't feel like dreams so much as like consciously constructed virtual realities. Paprika is a brilliant, surreal exploration of the imagination and the subconscious -- the parts of the mind that have a mind of their own. The visual inventiveness is a joy to behold, and he wields genre structures with great inventiveness as well. I'm very sorry that we won't be seeing more movies from Satoshi Kon (although there was one in the works that might be completed without him), but I highly recommend Paprika to anyone who hasn't checked it out yet.
I've seen a couple of people writing that Inception clearly took some inspiration from Paprika, but I really don't see that at all. While they share the idea of a machine that allows one person to enter another person's dream, this idea goes back much further than Paprika -- c.f. Zelazny's "He Who Shapes" (1965), and I'm guessing it goes back even further than that. Paprika is also about the irrationality of dreams, which is the opposite of Inception, where the dreams don't feel like dreams so much as like consciously constructed virtual realities. Paprika is a brilliant, surreal exploration of the imagination and the subconscious -- the parts of the mind that have a mind of their own. The visual inventiveness is a joy to behold, and he wields genre structures with great inventiveness as well. I'm very sorry that we won't be seeing more movies from Satoshi Kon (although there was one in the works that might be completed without him), but I highly recommend Paprika to anyone who hasn't checked it out yet.
