Paprika (2006)

R: If you haven't heard, membership at The Michigan just got much better, since it now includes access to The State. We'd been waiting to exercise this new privilege, and decided to go this week to see Paprika.

This is a film about a machine the lets researchers see and interact with patients' dreams. As you might expect, this machine is stolen, and things go terribly wrong. Dreams become hallucinations, and the researchers have to both save dreamland, and separate it from reality once again.

In case you hadn't guessed, this is anime, and if you know me you know that, as a rule, I don't like anime. The basic problem is that I take animation seriously as an art form -- the art of movement. While most anime has striking images, the movement itself, the stuff between the frames, tends to be poor. We could argue about its origins in manga, or whatever, but it's had, what, 30 years to grow up? For the most part, it hasn't. Instead, it's a cheap way to make a movie that would otherwise have a big special effects budget. Woo hoo.

I liked Paprika, though. The animation isn't good, but it is mediocre, which is to say that it doesn't often get in the way. I found the images more striking than most -- certainly interesting enough to justify the animation. While I still wish more attention had been paid to how the various crazy things morphed into one another, I think Satoshi Kon captured enough of dream logic that he needed animation, and that's pretty cool.

I think there have been complaints that the characters are kind of flat. It's an understandable criticism, since the characters don't really develop in the traditional way. They develop through their dreams, or maybe the interactions of their dreams, which is also pretty cool. It would be nice if they were convincing as people too, but I think I can let it slide. After all, the characters in my dreams tend toward the archetypal too.

So, in the end, I'd encourage you to see it. In fact, I think it looks pretty good on the big screen, and it's playing at the State at least until the end of the week!


K: Ross is about 4 skizillion times more qualified to comment on this movie than I am, so I'll just say that I also enjoyed it very much. It reminded me of Brazil, in that it managed to capture many elements of dreams that otherwise get overlooked. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen, despite the mediocre animation.

The Italian

R: We don't get many Russian movies at the Michigan, so I had high hopes for this one. It wasn't bad, but it's not fantastic either.

Adoption is a sensitive issue in Russia. They've got negative population growth to begin with, and there's something about Westerners buying the babies that you do have that, well, you can understand why it might be a sensitive issue. For that reason, I find the somewhat unflattering depiction of foreigners forgivable. It's one of many standard tropes that appear -- the two girls in the orphanage are, literally, a virgin in a mother's role and a whore -- and so I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly original about the movie. There are, however, some pretty visceral scenes, and I have to admit: russian kids are cute.

K: I felt like this movie was pretty conflicted--you're supposed to admire the boy for turning down an easy life with adoptive parents in a foreign country in favor of staying in his homeland and taking the chance finding his birth mother. But although I (kind of) admired his plucky, Disney-esque perseverance in the face of extreme odds, I kept hoping that he would just give up and go be happy in Italy with people who would love him. The orphanage (and Russia in general) comes off as dirty, corrupt, and ill-run...not to mention the fact that he is searching for an end that is uncertain in the extreme.

On a more superficial level, the whole thing was a little too Incredible Journey for me: boy goes on a journey and meets a wacky cast of characters who help (or thwart) him along the way. All he needed was a talking animal sidekick (a wise-cracking cat, maybe?) and he'd be ready to go.

That said, I know that there's a huge subtext to this movie that may be more subtle (as in many Disney epics, the subtext is more of a supertext) to someone with more context than I have...say...Ross.