The brilliant “Paprika,” directed by Satoshi Kon — a masterly example of Japanese anime, intended for adults — is partly hand drawn, and features multiple areas of visual activity layered at different distances from the picture plane.
Set in a business world of long white corridors and glass walls and research labs, it’s a Freudian-Jungian-Felliniesque sci-fi thriller, and an outright challenge to American viewers, who may, in the face of its whirligig complexity, feel almost pea-brained.
Paprika, the heroine, is an eighteen-year-old sprite — a kind of sexy Japanese Tinker Bell — who enters people’s dreams as a form of therapy. She explains to one of her patients, a detective haunted by a murder he was unable to prevent, that the first dreams we have when we fall asleep are like arty short films and longer dreams are like blockbusters.
“Paprika” asks, “Who shall control our dreams?,” which, given this film’s take on the cinematic nature of the unconscious, is really asking, “Who shall control the movies?”
