Paprika

This being the 4th of July, it was only fitting that my buddy and I should go see a Japanese anime movie to celebrate.

But first, some previews.

MY BEST FRIEND–An unlikeable guy (Daniel Auteuil) has ten days to prove that he has a best friend or…um…well, I couldn’t really tell what would happen. But he meets a taxi driver (Dany Boon) who is extremely likable and asks him how he does it, in the process, making a real friend for the first time in his life.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the preview is pretty funny. It’s definitely one that I’ll at least check out on video.

ARCTIC TALE–This looks like it could be, quite possibly, the worst movie ever. It’s another documentary about animals in the snow. And, while I like the message it sends about how global warming is bad, I think that Queen Latifah’s voice overs are cheesier than Morgan Freeman’s in the filmmaker’s last movie about cold animals, March Of The Penguins.

I’ll pass.

ROCKET SCIENCE–Whereas Eagle Vs. Shark was a Napoleon Dynamite ripoff that didn’t go anywhere and how maybe two laughs, Rocket Science looks like one that could actually have some really good laughs.

A stuttering kid joins the debate team to get the girl. And he’s the most awkward kid since Napoleon. I’m all for it and I can’t wait to see it.

And now, on to the anime!

Paprika is a young woman who helps people with their dreams. In the opening scene, she’s helping a cop, Kogawa, to interpret his dreams. She uses a new device that allows people to infiltrate others’ dreams.

But is Paprika real? Or is she just a dream version of Dr. Chiba Atsuko?

When someone gets a hold of the device and starts to make the dream world mix with the real world, Atsuko and her crew find out just how powerful dreams really can be.

Director Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Perfect Blue) has created a trippy movie that makes you wonder about dreamworlds and their power over our real world. What is the “real me”? Is it the me in this world? Or is it the me in my dreams? Could the dream me be a facet of the real me that could actually come out at some point?

I can’t say that I fully understood the movie, but I did like it a lot. Any movie with a parade of refrigerators and frogs is a-ok in my book.

But it wasn’t just the strangeness. It was the characters and the mind-trip that made me love it.

Although, I do think that Tokita was just there for a bunch of fat jokes. He was a big part of the story, but he was a big part of the comedy, too.