Paprika

Just knocking them out of the park.

You know, little discoveries like Paprika, the America Sweethearts conversation was pretty hilarious.

Love Witch has hit over 5,000 views on YouTube.

That's crazy.

you know, I, I, I really liked the first two episodes of the season that we did.

I thought we started off really strong.

Um, he, I, I, uh, I forgot that we had Izzy on for Sinners, or for Paprika and the Lost Boys.

Yeah.

Actually, this time last year, me and Joey reviewed Perfect Blue.

So today we are doing kind of a sister episode and reviewing Paprika.

Paprika is a 2006 Japanese animated science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sesshi Minakami.

Might butcher a couple of these names.

Fair warning.

of...

Yeah, so let me ask you two.

Do you guys think is Paprika the main character or is the detective the main character?

oh god it's in there i have the picture of like the movie cover if it helps dream dream like psychedelic inception but it's not called inception it's called it's called

it's a seasoning if it helps Paprika! There you go, buddy.

I

was so fucking stunned.

Like, I cannot emphasize how clear I saw it in my mind's eye.

And when something is so abundantly clear and still not coming.

So he did Paprika.

And then, frankly, even more notable, fairly confident, he was the guy who did Perfect Blue.

yeah it's crazy and like my little bumper sticker for this is like this is the most uh like film anime i've ever seen and there's these and we'll get through we'll get into this but like there's even these shots that are like contrasting itself to anime as we know like big eyes and like really um you know cute shoujo and things like that um and that makes it stand out like i feel like this is a film film that happens to be animated and this is a master that knows his stuff and who deserves to be talked about in the same you know conversations as david lynch for example

It was one of those animated films of like, I was watching this around the same time that I was discovering films like Paprika, and like having this real moment of like, oh, something can be a film first and foremost and animated as a vehicle for that and not just this is animated and I guess it's good too.

Yeah, and I think that really reflects in Satoshi Kon's entire work because I think he brought in the beginning, even though his background was in manga and animation, I think there's a lot of the language of cinema is all over all of his works in a way that you don't always see.

I've seen a lot of interesting interviews with a lot of the kind of titans of of anime talk about like, you know, the transition from people in the seventies, eighties, even into the nineties that were, have a background in film first and migrated into animation and how they were bringing that perspective and those disciplines and those principles of, of storytelling and to, to the language of animation.

Yeah.

Well, and to use some double-blind or, like, some law and order logic, of course, killers and criminals want to be caught so roomie is going to all this painstaking effort on some level maybe to help mima see what's going on and help her see mima's room that she's been maintaining because she wants this to go appreciated she wants this to have this impact on mima because it's going to make all this work she's been putting into it meaningful And you talk about the power of that kind of dream logic.

This just seems like a great time before we move on to mention this quote from this Washington Post interview that Satoshi Kon did in the wake of Paprika launching in the US.

The interview says, what's the appeal of dreams? And Kon says, if you look at a dream overall, it's very difficult to discern the meaning.

I was like, nah, I'm empty.

But then I thought Paprika.

And that's a movie you can dive into.

Which I have

And I do think that there...

I did Paprika recently, and the Paprika sauce was around 720p, but they stuck HDR and Dolby Vision on there and it looked gorgeous.

Yeah.

I'm not going to say for a second that you need to get any more detail.

I'm not-

I, in fact, I called my dad, and I was like, "You hear the movies I've watched recently?" And I watched, uh, I watched Paprika.

Oh, I haven't seen it.

Uh, old anime movie.

It is terrifying because it lays the absolute conceptual groundwork for simulation theory.

Long before The Matrix or Dark City or Satoshi Kon's Paprika, Philip K. Dick was suggesting that reality is just a broadcast.

And if it's a broadcast-

If it's a broadcast, it can be interrupted by a commercial break, or it can be shut off entirely if you've just failed to pay the bill.

Sweet 16.

We have, starting in the top left, Paprika versus Oppenheimer.

Jaws versus Blowout.

Did we want to do comments after each one? Well, I was just