Review of Paprika

Re-watching this movie the other day may have saved anime for me. I was getting too far away from the raw creativity and beauty of the art form, getting lost in a sea of cliches and contrivances. Aside from Evangelion 3.0 coming out later this year, I had given up on anime as a whole. I'm not going to name names but... Eden of the East, Full Metal Panic, I'm looking at you. Anyway, this movie is just brilliant. It's a mess of a plot really. I still don't understand a lot of it after the 3rd viewing. But that's not the point in this case.The point here is to loose yourself in a truly TRULY bizarre visual roller-coaster ride, the likes of which really have no parallel. This is proof that animation is capable of depicting the most surreal images that the mind can muster- those that we see when we dream. One could compare the conventions found in Paprika to those of The Cell or Inception, both live action films. However, because Paprika is not constricted to a certain level of realism like those films, it is allowed to take similar subject matter (the dream) and outshine them in nearly every facet. The things that you will see in this movie range from orgasmic flourishes of color, back to muted modern sheen, and then back again to the type of psychedelia infused imagery that would send an LSD-user into a shrieking fit of terror.
Anime is interesting to me for this reason primarily: Its difference from conventional western tropes. Maybe to an avid fan of Japanese cinema, the imagery here is not so strange. I suppose if you are subjected to anything enough, it becomes rather average. And maybe that's what happened to me back in 2010, when I, mostly just bored of seeing the same things over and over again, threw in the towel on anime. But this movie may have been all I needed- a relentlessly creative bombarding of the senses. A dream.