Aaron's back, and remembering an animation feature no-one should write off as 'just a cartoon'...

Anime writer/director Kon Satoshi has died, leaving behind a body of work that delved far into the reaches of dreams and imagination, questioning reality and pushing animation as a medium to new heights with each step. Entering the business as a designer and writer, within a short time he directed his first feature, 1998’s Perfect Blue.

An in-name-only adaptation of a novel by Yoshizaku Takeuchi, the story concerns Kirigoe Mima, a naïve pop singer trying to make the jump into serious acting while near-blindly navigating the pitfalls of managerial manipulation, predatory opportunism and obsessive (as well as indifferent) fandom; or as Time Out London’s Tony Rayns put it, “the vulnerability of one's sense of self; the flimsiness of a public persona; [and] the price to be paid for female complicity with male fantasies” all set against the mid-nineties dawn of the Useful Internet. When I recommend this movie to others, I couch it in relation to other mid-nineties psycho-thrillers like Se7en or as a thought experiment: what if Hitchcock was making movies in millennial Japan?

I never mention it’s animated, however. Most people’s minds still dwell in the animation age ghetto (the idea that because something is animated, it is automatically a “cartoon”), and prefacing a recommendation with the fact of the film’s medium does it a pre-emptive disservice; it predisposes the recommendation’s target to dismiss the work before the plot synopsis is even begun. Thus, most people I show the movie to don’t even know it’s not live-action until it starts. Eschewing any kind of “cartoon-y” camera angles, cuts, shots, design elements or sound, Perfect Blue is a better-than-average mid-nineties psycho-thriller which just happens to be animated. I think a little surprise is good for the soul.

The surprises begin in the second act, having established Mima’s exit from girl-group CHAM, her managers Rumi (a former pop idol herself) and Tadokoro’s opinions on her decision, and her first limited forays into dramatic acting. Mima is serious about her career change, while Tadokoro is supportive to the point of pushiness and Rumi would prefer she stays with the group. Mima’s fame as a singer was negligible: CHAM (yes, it’s always rendered in all-caps), performs banal songs of questionable quality and still plays to small crowds after several years of existence but has a small, dedicated fan base including a coterie of pop culture aficionados who function as a sort of chorus, commenting on the progress of Mima’s transition and the general state of Japanese television serials.

"'Mima’s Room' is a sort of proto-blog, detailing the minutia of her day and even quoting her directly when no one should have heard her"

The role in question is a tiny part in a serial drama called Double Bind, which borrows heavily from The Silence of the Lambs (to the point of plagiarism) and The X-Files. Mima’s role is darkly expanded following positive viewer response and she is consequently fed further into the celebrity-industrial complex. Complicating her switch are the threatening faxes and letters she has been receiving in the wake of her shift which soon become brutal murders of the people responsible for her perceived sullying, perhaps committed by Mima herself.

Dating the film somewhat, but in a sort of kitschy way and not to the point of detriment, is the story’s use of the internet, which at that time was far from ubiquitous (“Oh, that thing that’s been popular lately” Mima says when it’s first mentioned). Following a fan letter’s mention of “Mima’s Room,” Mima, who appears to have never used a computer before, functions as a window into “Web 101”: as she learns about the net, the uninitiated viewer is given the context for part of Mima’s eventual unraveling - the website “Mima’s Room” is a sort of proto-blog, detailing the minutia of her day and even quoting her directly when no one should have heard her.

At the time of the film’s conception and release, this was a novel concept - someone is pretending to be a celebrity and writing from her perspective on the internet, to her own confusion and concern. Mima is unaware the site is written by a stalker called Me-Mania, whom she sees randomly, just for seconds, sometimes disappearing as fast. The site is so thorough that as the pressure on Mima grows after she films a rape scene and submits to a nude photo shoot, she begins reading the site to find out what she did that day. However, the Mima from the site disagrees with the real woman’s decisions and she begins to hallucinate a sort of Ghost-Mima who harangues her over her decisions and reinforces her worries that her life is living her.

"The animation is designed in such a proficient, cinematic manner that over the years I’ve wished this would have been made or would be remade in live-action"

The film’s principal successes lie in the technical aspects: editing and cinematography. As the story progresses and Mima’s hold on reality continues to slip, the intercutting of scenes from Double Bind and the narrative do become more frequent and jarring, especially as the plot of the show appears to become intertwined with her real identity.

Also notable is the, well, I guess you’d call it camerawork. The animation is designed in such a proficient, cinematic manner that over the years I’ve wished this would have been made or would be remade in live-action, keeping much of the original’s framing and pacing. Of particular note are two of the film’s signature shots: Ghost-Mima skipping on streetlights and one of my favorite shots in all of film: as Mima is chasing her phantom doppelganger through a radio station where the remaining (and more successful without her) members of CHAM are recording a show, the ghost pauses ever-so-quickly to give a gloating smirk at the woman she’s driving insane, clearly relishing the effect she’s causing.

I’d like to say the cinematography and editing is so good you forget you’re watching animation, but that would be a flat-out lie. You never forget it’s animated, you just don’t care - you only wish it were live-action because you so rarely see editing this fluid in any medium. By the time Mima really begins to lose her mind, the scene transitions are coming so fast - sometimes right in the middle of a word - you get sucked into her confusion. Since it’s been building from the very beginning, it’s not confusing; instead, it effectively illustrates the protagonist’s mental state: she doesn’t know what’s happening, she barely knows what day it is, she only knows she must continue on the path she’s created.

This is the real reason to watch the movie. As far as its genre and time period, it’s better than average, but the average is admittedly low. For every Perfect Blue or Se7en, there’s eight swinging sacks of shit like Body of Evidence, Color of Night, Jade or Never Talk to Strangers. This picture built its enduring fan base less on its story than on the masterful execution of that story, and stands with its successors Millennium Actress and Paprika as testament to the seemingly limitless visual imagination of Kon Satoshi.

Bonus: The remake rights were purchased by Darren Aronofsky so this could happen:

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