SPOILERS
As an explosion of dream imagery, Paprika wows. As a cogent narrative, it amounts to about as much as most other "important" Japanese animated films -- inscrutable plot machinations developing towards a cosmic battle between absolute good and absolute evil. Expect a lot of talk about existence in the positive and the negatory, and frogs banging on drums.
Paprika is one of a long line of modern Japanese films that overcompensate for their society's past repression of women by imbuing the heroine with god-like power and ultimate purity. The titular character is half-Kiki, half-Virgin Mary; she is cutesy and mythically well-endowed, pseudo-climactically canceling out the film's pitch-black antagonist through a metaphysical sort of confrontation that's beyond absurd, a Godzilla vs. Mothra staging that's basically a blow-up of what happens when particles of matter and anti-matter make contact. The film, however, also couches this confrontation in terms of woman being the answer to man. And, as a man, I have to ask: are we really that bad? I admire Paprika's attempts to deepen its text with psychology, but psychology is a complex tangle of gray areas, and when most of the film's primary characters end up reductively yin and yang, inner drama is lost to showy theatrics. And a big naked girl swallowing a big naked man-shadow.
Make no mistake, though, this is some of the most captivating animated imagery this side of Miyazaki. Even rivals Miyazaki, and with its adult rating and more oblique ambitions, occasionally marries Miyazaki with Murakami. It's unfortunate that the whole's not more nuanced, that the characters are too conceptual, and that half the time you're wondering what the four-letter-word is going on.
-Chad Betz
Guest Reviewer
No comments:
Post a Comment