Those who don’t tend to dip their toes frequently in the pool of endless possibilities that is Anime tend to write the majority of it off as loud, busy culture shock that tend to skew towards either the perverse or the infantile. Post apocalyptic worlds, dripping sex tentacles, superpowered high school girls, extravagantly haired screaming martial artists – the generalising is endless even in the face of examples of Studio Ghibli or Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira that deal with huge, weighty themes to go along with their stunning visuals.
Well, another name that should help alter this imbalance is Satoshi Kon, a filmmaker who not only beat Christopher Nolan to the dream manipulating punch with Paprika four years before Inception, but delivered a near-perfect psychological thriller that stands as a modern day giallo every bit as haunting and visually astounding as Dario Argento gave us in his heyday. The film is Perfect Blue and if any animated film is proof that they should be regarded as equally as live action, it’s this one.
J-Pop idol singer Mima Kirigoe is desperate to leave the world of being uncomfortably idolised by twentysomething men and wants to move over into the world of acting despite her manager, Rumi Hidaka, claiming its a bad move. Regardless, Mima gets herself a role in a lurid TV detective show called Double Bind which initially only gives her a handful of lines, and after her agent lobbies for her to get a larger part, she finds that her role expands in ways she didn’t count on.
Meanwhile, while Mima tries to get used to her career change, various stressful events occur that start pushing her into the clutches of paranoia, with the main one being the presence of a blog named named Mima’s Room that details her daily routine in first person with creepy accuracy. Also, she starts spotting a dead-eyed, obsessive fan named Me-Mania everywhere she goes, but what really lights the touch paper on a prospective mental breakdown is that her expanded role on Double Bind means that her character has to endure a brutal gang rape scene which goes directly against the clean cut, squeaky clean image she originally had.
Before you know it the people who are seen to be leading her astray are turning up viciously stabbed to death, be it the scriptwriter of Double Bind or a photographer who convinced her to do a nude photoshoot and all the pressure piling on has Mima experiencing psychosis where her grasp of time all but evaporates and she starts hallucinating an floating apparition of herself from her J-Pop days who happily claims to be the “real Mima”. As Mima’s grasp on reality checks out of work early, she imagines herself as the murderer – but due to the mounting pressure of her chaotic life, she has no clue if her fragmented memory, or the other people in her life, can be trusted.
In a more fucked up world, we maybe could have gotten Perfect Blue about two decades sooner if we’d gone back in time and simply swapped out Walt Disney’s brain for Dario Agento’s, but as it stands, I’m more than happy we managed to get it via more conventional means as Perfect Blue may be one of the greatest animated thrillers – no, screw that – thrillers period that I have ever seen. Other movies have explored the terrifying ramifications of losing your mind while particularly frenzied murders have been occurring uncomfortably close to your social orbit, but none have had the limitless palette of anime to play with before, but while the medium literally has the ability to do anything it’s director wishes, Satoshi Kon takes an ingenious alternate route.
Rather than going for broke with a far less subtle approach, Kon instead creates a world that is incredibly grounded without any initially apparent exaggeration (although the fact that the leering Me-Mania has a pair of eyes that seem to be at least six feet apart seems pretty sus) and without any weird tech or overtly cartoonish character designs to distract you, the movie lures you in with a sense of rock solid reality and then starts fucking with the very foundations of its lead character’s sense of perception that even a slight distortion of her world seems catastrophic.
It also helps that the movie isn’t afraid to shine a very uncomfortable light on the sort of fandom that seems to gravitate around the more arguably salacious aspects of Japanese culture and has a few salient points to make. For as start, we see right at the beginning that every single one of the fans who have come out to see Mima’s farewell performance with her J-Pop group, CHAM!, are all males who are, at least, in their mid twenties who are either cheering crazily or cynically assessing her performance in the only toxic fans can.
However, there’s always been something somewhat unnerving about a cutesy J-Pop act that has an all-male fan base (even more now with all the waifu stuff I see on Instagram) it’s incredibly interesting that Perfect Blue seems to be targeting its own fan base, or at least a similar type of fan that tends to graduate toward certain types of Anime, and as Mima’s life sees her in ever more sexually explicit situations, her followers pass sardonic judgement without a thought for what she may actually be going through.
While Perfect Blue takes a savvy, satirical swing as the nature of the worship of celebrities and toxic fandom, it doesn’t do it at the expense of the tension and while it’s strangely endearing to watch someone explain a fledgling internet to someone else, it’s quite telling that Kon immediately points out how fucking creepy being online can really be as early as 1997 and as the stalking escalates and blood starts to flow the movie uses every subverted storytelling trope in the book to keep you thrown off just as much as the beleaguered Memi. It’s here that the director starts fucking with time and perspective, charting her break with reality as filming of her gratuitous scene of sexual assault proves to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Trying to juggle the shame of the experience with her spiralling paranoia, the more surreal aspects of animation finally takes hold and it proves to be a visual feast that’s been strip mined by such other celebrated filmmakers such as Darren Aronofsky (infamously, I might add) and Edgar Wright who used a lot of the reflection motifs in Last Night In Soho.
And yet, Perfect Blue has a few homages of its own – the vicious murder sequences may feel Agento-esque in their ferocity, but the skilled use of an ice pick recalls Paul Verhoven’s Basic Instinct and the intense blurring of reality could be traced back as far as early Polanski.
However, regardless of whom is homaging whom, Perfect Blue remains as one of the most original and unforgettable experiences the medium has to offer primarily because it’s somewhere the genre has never really gone before. Rampaging mecha and dark fantasy may be the natural place to go for Japanese animation, but thanks to Kon’s practically flawless balance of the material, we are gifted a true work of haunting art that’s every bit as hypnotically beautiful as it is bestial and cruel.
Perfect it is, then.
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