Satoshi Kon’s filmography is both limited while also being one of the richest. Granted, that is partially because so much of his earliest creative years were spent as a manga artist then in anime, and partially because he died far too young from pancreatic cancer. His first film work came in 1992 as a scriptwriter, background designer, and layout artist for the omnibus film Memories. It is here that his use of reality and fantasy fusing together in discord and harmony came into being.
His transition away from working under others came in 1994. The manga Seraphim: Wings of 266, 613, 336 was written by Mamoru Oshii with Kon illustrating the book. They came into that age old conflict, ‘creative differences,’ and wound up putting the series into hiatus and, eventually, permanently unfinished. It was then that Kon decided to dedicate himself to making anime on his own terms.
It would take three years before his first solo work, but that first work would be an emblematic masterpiece. 1997’s Perfect Blue is such a fully realized debut film that nearly the entirety of Kon’s directorial obsessions is visible in this one text. Think of it as a Rosetta stone for deciphering the main thrust of his authorial eye. It would be mildly dismissive to merely regulate Perfect Blue to “if David Lynch did animation,” but it is clear that Lynch and Kon are simpatico artists with similar questions about reality and consciousness. One could even write an entire thesis about the ways in which they harness the male gaze in works like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Perfect Blue to similarly fascinating and disturbing ends.
If Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me turned the dead woman at the center of the story from found object to active, realized person, then Perfect Blue also uses the male gaze of the camera’s eye to observe a female character encountering how restrictive and dehumanizing it can be. In loosely adapting Yoshikazu Takeuchi’s novel, Kon finds the first of his many female protagonists who encounters the faulty line between sanity and insanity, reality and imagination. And he managed to do it all while slowly predicting our current landscape of digital avatars/personas and the ways in which they can overpower our real lives.
The basics of the plot are simple – former pop starlet quits group to make it as an actress, threatening stalker, various murders point to her as the prime suspect – but how they are utilized is what energizes Perfect Blue. Mima is at a crossroads in every aspect of her personal and professional life. Not only is she completely changing careers, but this change has left her without a solid grasp of her identity. Who is she if she is not a widely adored pop star in a successful girl group?
Add into this instability and insecurity a website proclaiming to be her diary that reveals deeply personal details that she has no recollection of sharing, a stalker threatening constantly to harm her if she does not return to her former group, and a series of murders that orbit around the men responsible for the change in her career and image. That website is a lynchpin in the film’s various through lines and queasy treatment of identity. If Mima is not responsible for these confessionals, then who is? And why are they perpetuating the fraud of being her?
This is the purest distillation of the blurring lines of identity and legitimacy that Perfect Blue explores. Even in the earliest days, the website is largely walls of text with a few images thrown in, the internet’s power for communication and spreading of false selves is evident. Not just false selves but false information. Mima’s confessionals are taken as gospel truths, an intimate conversation between the star and her stalker, that perpetuate violent acts in the name of love and adoration. Or maybe the killer is someone else and the stalker is merely a helpless pawn in a larger game.
It is not just in the ways that this mounting paranoia disrupts Mima’s sense of self, but in the normalized degradations she encounters. Men look upon her as a product, a thing to sexualize, commodify, and sell. Mima’s sense of self was always going to become porous and slippery given that she seems too sensitive and meek when we first meet her, so this gauntlet’s aggressiveness was always going to have dire consequences. Hell, even Perfect Blue recognized a troubling pattern of pop starlet’s tendency to pose in sexually provocative manners to prove that they are no longer the “good girl” of their past. Sexual agency is one thing, but Mima’s clearly being thrown about by the masculine forces and gazes around her.
Eventually Mima does manage to wrestle control of the narrative and her persona back from these disparate forces. The ending is happy, to an extent, but it is a hard-won victory over our heroine’s battle to win back control from the players seeking to co-opt it from her. She is powerless in the face of media saturation and its ability to legitimize the false until she decides just who she wants to be and what she wants in her life and career. The very idea of female performance is the crux and argument of Perfect Blue, and it is one in which the gaze is slowly stripped away from the male and into something else.
That something else would be the main thrust of Kon’s career going forward. If Perfect Blue was the male gaze turning inward and creating violence against itself, then 2001’s Millennium Actress was the feminine gaze being given the floor. In fact, the film often folds its gaze upon itself like the filmic equivalent of a trompe-l'œil or a narrative Escher drawing. Telling the story of two documentary filmmakers out to interview a retired, reclusive actress from Japan’s postwar cinema, Millennium Actress eventually blurs the lines between past, present, and fictional.
Borrowing in fragments from the lives of Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, Millennium Actress presents a giant leap forward for Kon’s obsessive themes of the dream space between reality and fantasy. The framework is fairly simple but provides ample room for time-warping and the distinctions between the films the title actress made and her own autobiography to dissolve. And dissolve they do.
But they do not dissolve with the sustained paranoia and terror that marinated in Perfect Blue but with romanticism and melodrama. The reclusive actress is Chiyoko Fujiwara, and when presented with the opportunity to tell her life story the whole exercise transforms into a worm hole where everything mashes together in a way that is alternately poetic and confounding in the best manner. Millennium Actress asks for us to let go of our preconceived notions of narrative truth and instead indulge in an entirely new way of seeing and receiving.
Plenty of comparisons abound to Mulholland Drive in critical notices at the time, but I would argue this has less to do with the film itself and instead is just lazy criticism, and that Perfect Blue would be a better comparison to Lynch’s masterpiece. This one feels more akin to the autobiographical poems of Fellini’s 8 ½ or Fosse’s All That Jazz. Granted, Kon’s actress is an invention built from disparate parts of real performers, mainly the two previously mentioned leading ladies, and numerous references to some of the biggest titles and genres of Japan’s postwar period. After all, not only do we get explicit references to the likes of Throne of Blood and Godzilla, but the quieter domestic works of Yasujirō Ozu.
Chiyoko’s story is also fascinating in how she finds duplicates throughout her film career, essentially recasting the roles of her mother and a witch (who may or may not actually exist) with the same actress she acts opposite in a domestic drama. Or in the way that her main life quest to find the mysterious artist who left her a key and captured her heart is reflected in a movie about her looking for a missing lover. Chiyoko’s eternal quest for that fleeting lost love is presented as a series of surreal adventures in which she enters the past or another film set through a doorway or walking into another room.
Eventually one of the documentarians is revealed to have a past with Chiyoko while the other offers sarcastic commentary throughout. If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately sprang to mind, then I would offer that you were probably on the right course for their function. They are another mirror, the documentarian watching the past unfold and another tortured lover chasing after a mysterious object of lust. Chiyoko’s power of her emotional state is so vast that she causes nearly everything to orbit around and become shaped by her whims and moods.
I mean all of this with deep affection. So much of Millennium Actress is shaped by the cultural conversations around actresses, especially among the film lover’s devotion to cinematic divas but the general culture’s indifference when they passed a certain age, that it becomes about so much more than just this one woman. She is a host, a symbol for the love of the medium. She is a grand poem to the eternal search for that first fleeting blush, that awakening of desire.
Look no further than the climax in which Chiyoko says that she never minded not finding that mysterious painter again because the search for him was the true thrill. Her self-imposed sentence to 1,000 years of chasing after a shadow of unrequited love is reflected in Kon’s own vibrancy and search for the possibilities of the cinema’s edges. There is no limitation beyond the imagination. Kon’s own love is boundless and eternal, like Chiyoko’s eventual ascendency to the cosmos. His sophomore feature was no less a masterpiece than his debut, and in many instances, was a fuller, richer work.
2003’s Tokyo Godfathers, a loose remake of John Ford’s 3 Godfathers, is the apple in a bag of oranges of Kon’s career. Whereas the other major works involved questioning the porous lines between being awake and dreaming, sanity and madness, or reality and fantasy, Tokyo Godfathers is a film that is largely a sentimental melodrama with dashes of magical realism and comic perversity. It makes for the comparatively weakest effort of Kon’s career, but even his weakest effort is still worthy of a viewing recommendation.
The story involves three of Tokyo’s homeless discovering a discarded infant and their midnight journey to find its parents. Alcoholic gambler Gin, transwoman Hana, and spiky teenage runaway Miyuki form a vagabond familial unit despite knowing very little about what drove them to their present existence. Their sojourn to find the rightful parents of Kiyoko (“pure child” in Japanese), named so for reasons both religious and artistic after Hana dubs the child this having just listened to a children’s choir sing “Silent Night,” is but the window dressing to the various stories of their past lives, their hopeful dreams for the future, and the harsh present.
For all the likability of the central trio and their interactions, which are principally responsible for the bulk of the film’s slapstick humor and sardonic one-liners, Kon also uses them to express the darkness of the story’s core. Who would dump a newborn infant into the trash? Why are they all obsessed with fulfilling this quest beyond the basics of being a “Good Samaritan”? There is a deeper truth that this infant represents for each of them, and in fulfilling this quest, maybe they can heal from the core wound that drove them to the streets in the first place.
The Tokyo as established here is one of greys, metallics, and sterile lighting that render it nearly inhospitable, if not inhumane, to its residents. As the midnight hours drift away and the sunlight pokes through, and as the humanity of the characters deepens and enriches their lives, the colors warm up and the city nearly sparkles. Numerous bits of background ephemera practically make faces reflecting the emotional states of the characters, ones they are often conflicted about speaking aloud while internally rolling them over and over. In fact, during the closing credits after the happy ending, for all his darkness Kon is a bit of a sentimentalist at heart, the streets and skyscrappers of Tokyo illuminate and bounce as Beethoven’s 9th plays.
At times the plot’s insistence on meaningful coincidence (just how many people tied to their various pasts are they going to run into in one night?) becomes a bit of a strain, or too obviously underlines some of thematic material. The mysteries guiding his greatest works is not here. In fact, the film is best when things happen that defy logic or reason, like Hana’s leaping off a building to save Kiyoko ending in a gust of wind gently lowering them safely to the ground. There is no rhyme or reason for this to have happened when it did other than a certain thrumming of magical realism throughout. If not magical realism, then perhaps a religiosity that also ties into a yearning for recovery and reconnection.
Tokyo Godfathers is something of an anomaly for Kon, but one that is also tantalizing for what else he may have had up his sleeve. We saw his penchant for fantastical creations, but who knew he could create something that operated largely in the realm of the mundane. Alternately grotesque and fanciful, Tokyo Godfathers may not be the strongest work in his oeuvre, but it is not without its charms and merits.
2006’s Paprika was a long gestating project for Kon. One of those cinematic obsessions that director’s chase for years and years before finally getting it made or it becomes a tantalizing “what if” for their fans. Originally intended as the follow-up to Perfect Blue before the company financing the project went bankrupt, Paprika lingered in various stages of development for years. It would be reductive to label his previous works as trial runs for Paprika, but it does feel like Kon’s cinematic point-of-view in its purest, strongest distillation.
If Perfect Blue used the primitive internet to demonstrate the burgeoning sense of digital identities and false realities and Millennium Actress used biography and film as mirror reflections or inverses of each other, then Paprika combines all of that into one narrative. Paprika is the dream detective alter-ego of a research psychologist trying to figure out who stole the device that allows her to enter the dreams of others and why they are using it to commit terrorist acts. We slip in and out of various dreams and realities so fluidly that keeping track of what is “real” becomes something a metatextual act. After all, the film opens with Paprika taking on the disguise of a clown and welcoming us to the greatest show on earth. She is referring not only to the dream world but the film that is being called back.
Kon argued that stopping to explain would interrupt the flow, and he was correct in this assessment. The film is a richer work for refusing to explain when we are in dreams and when we are in reality and when one character thinks they are in one only to realize they are in the other. The flow of the narrative is one of distortions and a journey in catching references and symbols.
An extended sequence finds Paprika shapeshifting from a sphinx to a mermaid to Pinocchio to Monkey King within minutes. This is the genius of the film and of Kon’s cinema. Animation can present us anything and everything as a medium and is only bordered by the imagination. Kon’s imagination was continually searching for those boundaries and seeing if they could be expanded. Things are continually porous in search of a greater truth at the heart of the narrative. I can only imagine the jealous coursing through Spike Jonze as Kon manages to out id his Being John Malkovich.
Aside from Tokyo Godfathers, Kon’s films work as one continuous piece commenting on the viewer and the character on the screen. In each of these instances it is a female protagonist. Each of the characters in these films assumes an alter-ego (or several, depending) in order to protect the ‘real self’ hidden away. Perfect Blue’s ingenue was in distress and fracturing, Millennium Actress’ retired screen star was more sanguine and playful, whereas Paprika as the largest contract between the two. The dream detective is a beautiful pixyish creation where the real person behind is an intelligent, icy, plain woman.
What is equally fascinating is the inevitable scene where the alter gets destroyed/threatened and the true self must restore the balance. Here, that means the pixie is pinned to a table like a butterfly, torn apart, revealing the naked, vulnerable body of the psychologist underneath. In order to save themselves from the situation, the psychologist and the projection must reunite and comeback into one singular being. The real and the dream forever conjoined and feeding into each other.
There is also something incredibly poetic, if not mildly tragic, about the final shot of Paprika. One character decides to go to the movies and walks by a marquee displaying the three previous films of Kon’s as the attractions. But there is a fourth one mentioned, Dreaming Kids, this could easily scan as a reference to the incomplete work that was to be his next project. It is a tantalizing tease about what was going to come next. We will never get a chance to watch Dreaming Machine, the actual name of the in-production film, but there is something cyclical about this ending. Kon’s work grew out of and on top of each other in a way that another director’s work does not. This fits as a cinematic goodbye to a towering figure with his final completed work as a bittersweet afterword.
Kon’s final work, 2007’s Good Morning, a short film that was commissioned for the Ani*Kuri15 project details a woman’s daily routine in the space between sleep and fully waking up to the day. The woman splits into two selves that occasionally merge back into one but more often go about the daily routine in slightly different but extremely similar manners. The two of them finally merge back together permanently in the final seconds with “good morning” being the lone piece of dialog.
Good Morning packs a lot into its slim minute-long runtime. Each of the shorts only lasted a minute so the director’s had to do a lot with little space. Kon leaned into his blurring of dreams and reality in perhaps the most mundane setting and execution of his works. No spongy reality like Millennium Actress, no elaborate dream world like Paprika, no fractured psyches like Perfect Blue, but rather a simple tale told effectively with his visual signifiers all in place.
If Paprika was the artistic culmination of his work, a veritable thundering climax, then Good Morning is the sweet afterglow. A tender kiss on the cheek as you say goodbye. One of the most consistent directors, and one of the few who earned his stripes as an ‘auteur,’ Kon’s films are individual stanzas within a long epic poem filled with rhymes and mirrors of each other.
But I will let Kon get the final word on his cinematic
work: “There is no single solution – that’s what I want most for my work to be.
I want people to see it in many different ways.”
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