Hitchcock in Disguise?

In having the pleasure in discoursing through the many differentiating intricacies of Japanese animation, whether it’s through my own thesis work on Hayao Miyazaki’s palpable economical and thematic influence on Western film-making or simply writing a review of a specific anime that has caught my personal attention, one feasible that never wanes in discussion for newcomers and adhere’s alike is the content that makes-up the genre. Specifically, a divide of well-known anime’s that attracts all audiences and ‘cult’ anime’s; animated pieces of work that although don’t necessarily entices a general cinema-goer, they all inherently imbue a distinctive art-quality that challenges the medium itself. Whether it’s Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg which challenges it’ viewer through it’s collage of varying imagery and minimal dialogue or Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll that differentiated due to its effervescent way of depicting violence and sexual tendencies, whilst anime has never shied away in ambitiously producing a multitude of concepts that not everyone will see or accept, there are a select few abstractions that are still, today, highly sort-after and referred to in such praise that it demands more analysis. This is very much the case in relation to Satoshi Kon’s filmography. Not only does Kon exhibit an enveloping complexity to his visual aesthetic that serves to visually emphasise a film’s whimsical motif, but his imagination in relation to the narrative is also an aspect that surprisingly doesn’t take heed in a genre that is still iffy in showing more serial themes. While his more recognisably psychedelic work of Paprika demonstrates this in ease, it’s Kon’s previous filmic entry of Perfect Blue that inherits this auteuristic complexity in a manner that is deemed more harrowing and oddly reflecting attitudes of the facade of entertainment…

Encouraged by her manager, Rumi, to pursue a career change, Mimi, the lead singer of the successful J-Pop ground ‘CHAM’ and a teen idol, decides to quit her bubblegum trio in pursuit of an acting career; performing in the television soap named ‘Double Blind’. However, upon her drastic switch from singing to acting, Mima’s bold choice doesn’t sit well with the young band’s male admirers, especially an unknown die-hard fan who starts posting insidious threats and disturbingly intimate information about Mima’s life on her own blog. Now, all those who swayed Mima into embracing a career that see’s her performing in eccentric rape scenes and posing nude for magazines end up brutally murdered, and a disconcerting doppelganger harasses her. Are these occurrences of her own self merely a palpable delusion? Or, is Mima really haunted by a ghost of her past?…

What was originally supposed to be a live-action direct to video series, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue rather emerged as an inadvertent original video animation (OVA) piece of animated work that consequently resulted in the said directors recognition amongst those who were, and still are, familiar with the multi-layering genre that is anime. Studio Madhouse’s decision to turn to initial project into a OVA, due to the 1995 Kobe earthquakes which severely damaged the said production studio, proved pivotal for aforesaid animated features legacy; as most famously seen from Darren Aromofsky’s feature of Requiem of a Dream which features a remake of a bathtub scene from Kon’s film and Black Swan which draws similarities between Perfect Blue in terms of a central heroine forever being haunted by what appears to a doppelganger. As much as Perfect Blue can be arguably seen as a ‘cult anime’ feature due to it’s faithful devotion, despite the far-gazing appreciation of all audiences, it’s an animated feature non-the-less that speaks volumes amongst passionate film-goers since it evokes ideas and theories that have engulfed the study of film and entertainment. It’s an animated feature that, whilst it does have a specific motif that shrouds Kon’s recognised name as an auteur of anime, Perfect Blue is a model of contemporary film discussion that justifies its importance within the anime scene. Considering the nature of the premise, with the actress of Mima subjecting herself in willingly being a part of violent sex scenes and a life of vanity which coincidentally attacks her own ‘identity’, as demonstrated through the ever-occurring ques of another Mima figure haunting her new life-style, it’s not hard to fathom just how much Perfect Blue impeccably fits in tangent with feminist film theory; a discourse that, from the name, dissects the woman’s role in a film and underpins the portrayal exhibited. Right from the opening scene, which bounces back and forth between the central character’s musical performance, her later engagement in becoming an actress and the young band’s male admirers that talk of Mima as a symbol of success, Perfect Blue announces itself as an arguable preoccupation of voyeurism through the perception of Mima’s obsessive and deranged fan that draws parallels with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window; where the depiction of the female figure is ‘manipulated’ through the gaze of the external and internal male point of view. As much as Mima willingly subjects herself to a life of extreme and sexual consequences, it’s a character choice that results her to the exploitation and pleasure of the male viewer; the audience member and the stalker character that’s seen as a metaphor of male desire and emasculation. What rather makes this male gaze point of view moot however is Mima’s persistence in becoming the ‘superwoman’ figure which not only see’s the character oppressing the male ‘point of view’, in relation to fighting off Me-Mania’s sexual fixation, but also reclaim’s her identity through Kon’s visual complexity.

While the specific inclination of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze is certainly pertinent in relation to Perfect Blue’s character and premise, what captures the eye personally is Kon’s affinity on the association between reality and and presumed reality, using the archetype of a pop-idol as an example. While Kon’s anime doesn’t wholly make sense in narrative terms, with the slightly ridiculous reveal of this doppelganger phantom accounting towards a revelation that’s never explained and brusquely thrown at our perception that rather disregards the film’s story momentum, what the film does excellently is to comment on the idea of fame; how star’s and devotee’s alike are drawn and ultimately become addicted over something that, in reality, is a facade. In shrewdly mirroring the times of pop-music’s and entertainment’s ‘golden-age’ of the 90’s, Kon eerily masks these perceivable sub-texts through the perception of Mima who, through her trauma of seeing apparitions of former singing self haunting her every step, gets to know herself in voluntarily performing in risque television scenes and even reading her own diary as compiled by a psychotic fan. Mima’s artificial pop self – one of three near-identical fluffy Lolitas that comprise girl-group Cham – revolts by taking on a life of its own, and all Mima can do is guiltily suffer its taunts, while trying to exorcise it in her new soap role. One of the ways in which Kon and screenwriter Murai Sadayuki poetically get this complex structure to beautifully envelop is through the subtle majesty of transitional techniques; editing mode of means like match-cuts and overlaying narration that underpins the central characters discord between what she has and what she wilfully left behind. In one scene from the series, it seems that Mima’s character Yoko is suffering from multiple-personality disorder, and is convinced that she’s really Mima – a baffling moment soon revealed as only a provisional representation of Mima’s predicament. Elsewhere, the carpet is pulled from under our feet several times in quick succession. A traumatic scene proves to be a dream as Mima wakes, but that reality is collapsed in turn as Mima wakes yet again in a replay of the same scene – a brilliant use of the hallucinatory repetitiveness of commercial animation.

While this reality-dream divide, that’s projected through Mima’s own psychosis, is nothing new to see of Kon’s work, especially seen in the ever-psychedelic Paprika, this auteuristic motif is fluidly devised through the film’s translucent visualisation. Kon, a manga artist who worked on the likes of Roujin Z and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure before his involvement with feature length animations, goes for a flat, flimsy look, often reducing background figures to faceless cut-outs, but dropping in jolts of visual complexity, quoting pop and manga images as manufactured product. At one point an excessively baroque flash of manga art – a generic big-eyed space girl – invades the screen, looking much more three-dimensional than the film’s real world. The execution becomes a complex metaphor for Mima’s reality, in which the everyday becomes a colour-drained place of exile from the pop universe. What’s also noteworthy is the motions of the animated figures themselves who are all fluid to the point of them looking as if all the movement of the characters were rotoscoped (an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action). While this wasn’t the case for Kon’s feature, it’s an achievement in itself that the said film closely tries to replicate a divided technique due to its initial 90’s release and the minimal technology that was available for animators at this time. It’s an overlooked feature which fully exploits the inherent beauty and innocence of cel animation and rivals the likes of Ghost in the Shell and Akira for its daring in showcasing frisky and rather extreme scenes of sex and violence.

According to Kon, cinema can undermine reality, revolting against the human mind that almost exclusively receives images from the actual environment. The question he presents us here within Perfect Blue, and to some extent in Paprika as well, is clear: Why should a simple image of something so familiar emerge as the perceived truth rather than a likeness appearing from the human mind? It’s this very exploration which makes Kon’s films so enjoyable to watch and ponder over; especially that of Perfect Blue which consistently tries to trick our own gaze of Mima and whether or not her harrowing fazes are really happening or not. As much as the revelation of these hauntingly psychedelic episodes that Mima faces is resolved through no real explanation, it’s the momentous build of these events that keeps our eyes fixated. To put it all rather simply, it challenges our notions of how people identify themselves with reality and what they want in their fantasies. Or in some instances, to accomplish a certain task, you may have to accommodate to your environments and the people that surround you, but at what point do you lose the distinction between reality and fantasy? The fact that this movie explores these very questions is what makes it truly stand out…

On that note, it’s time for me to end this week’s Film Review. As always everyone, thank you for reading my latest Halloween Special Film Review of Perfect Blue and if anyone wants to share their thoughts on the film or review itself, then you’re more than welcome to comment down below. For next week, I’ll be discussing the very first Star Wars film, A New Hope, and seeing how the very franchise itself became so beloved by those who adore the story and characters! With that said, thank you once again for reading my latest Film Review and I hope you’re all having a nice weekend! Adieu! 😃😱🗡️🩸💃👻🎃

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ – Alex Rabbitte