litteru spicy? No, very, with Paprika...

Having read a glowing review of the Japanese animation movie "Paprika" in the NYT...I seized upon the opportunity to watch it at Kendall Cinema. Let me quote from the NYT review:

In “Paprika,” a gorgeous riot of future-shock ideas and brightly animated imagery, the doors of perception never close. A mind-twisting, eye-tickling wonder, this anime from the Japanese director Satoshi Kon bears little relation to the greasy, sticky kid stuff that Hollywood churns out, those fatuous fables with wisecracking woodland creatures selling lessons in how to be a good child so you can grow up to be a good citizen.
...
...if you keep your eye on the screen and don’t overworry the plot particulars, you will be rewarded with a cavalcade of charming, gently outré and beautiful hallucinations. In “Paprika,” Mr. Kon bombards us with popping visual delights, including a dementedly cheery parade of inanimate objects in which household appliances, drumming frogs, beckoning cats, grinning dolls and even a red Shinto gate march in lockstep, sucking up human passers-by along the way. It can take a moment to situate yourself amid this splendidly controlled chaos. But this superabundance works to one of the film’s themes, namely that our fantasies, including those opened up by the Internet, are pulling us away from the material world and, perhaps, more dangerously from one another.

I have to agree -- Paprika is a visual delight and has wonderful suggestions of the inter-penetration of reality and the dreamworld. That theme in itself is nothing new and can prove very seductive for an animation movie which can seek to blur the lines between the two by means of slick sequence of events and fantastical occurrences. Most such storylines can be vague, based only on broad ideas -- in this case a device (the DC Mini -- pronounced charmingly as dee-si Mi-nee) which allows one to enter into people's dreams and hence provides the entry points to the exploration of the dream world -- which are dealt with inconclusively often and which involve similar developments: bad guy who misuses the invention to subvert its true noble aims, the hero/heroine with the "split/dual-personality" who acts as the brave voyager to redeem the situation...a love interest maybe...a colleague with a mean streak also thrown in good measure...

So Paprika has all that...quite hackneyed in terms of story and characters...but that may not be why you go to an anime movie (one cannot say that about Spirited Away, tho...). I think what I found terribly attractive about Paprika was it seamless blending of the real and the unreal...whichever way you look at it. It had that senselessness and disembodied feeling of dreams about it...floors buckling when you try to run, people trying to get you and all of them look like you, doors that emerge upon entirely new worlds...so in a way it lulls your senses in suspended animation...and soaks them in a gorgeous riot of colors...