Screened as part of NZIFF 2007

Paprika 2007

Papurika

Directed by Kon Satoshi

In anime master Kon Satoshi's (Millennium Actress) latest exhilarating thriller/detective story, a shrink must recover the machine that allows psychotherapists to alter their patients' dreams.

Japan In Japanese with English subtitles
90 minutes 35mm

Director

Screenplay

Minakami Seishi
,
Kon Satoshi. Based on the novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka

Photography

Kato Michiya

Editor

Seyama Takeshi

Music

Hirasawa Susumu

Voices

Hayashibara Megumi
,
Emori Toru
,
Hori Katsunosuke

Festivals

Venice, New York 2006

Elsewhere

The latest from anime master Kon Satoshi (Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress).

Paprika is part detective story, part thriller, part surrealist fantasia and a meditation on how we live out our subconscious lives through dreams, the Internet and movies themselves. The plot centers on a machine that allows psychotherapists to enter, and alter, the dreams of their patients. But when a prototype of this new invention, called the DC Mini, is stolen, havoc ensues: dreams collide and overtake the dreamer; the barrier between reality and nightmare is torn. Paprika takes its name from the ‘dream detective’ who is the alter ego of the research psychotherapist Dr Atsuko Chiba. She’s the shrink’s emissary into her patients’ unconscious, and now she must voyage into the unknown to discover who stole the DC Mini, and to save the world from going mad. Paprika is so packed with ideas and visual fireworks, it requires more than one viewing. It expands your notion of what animation can achieve. You wake from it as if from a dream: spooked, provoked and exhilarated.” — David Ansen, Newsweek