Review of Paprika

This movie dazzles with high-quality graphics: great animation and charadesign. The main theme of dreaming is perfectly highlighted thanks to a rich color palette and a musical environment which perfectly fit. It's all about dreaming. The dreams are seen as an escape to the constraints of reality which reach their maximum in big cities like Tokyo for instance; gathering more and more people, and forgetting them sometimes (cf. Tokyo Godfather), with their dreams too. These forgotten dreams are represented in the movie by this psychedelic parade processing to who knows what destination. Every character of the story are associated with particular constraints: having lost one's legs (thepresident of the research center), not moving easily because of one's overweight (the genius Tokita), not being able to free oneself from inner demons (the policeman), every time suppressing ones own feelings (Atsuko). What would occur then if the dreams of oppressing beings became true. We would assist to a huge surge of nonsense, a multicolor mixture of everyone's dreams and phantasms. The end of the movie may be a bit hasty, but aren't all the dreams ending like that?

Satoshi Kon gives here a wonderful work in all respects, both in the technical and figurative processes.