week fourteen: satoshi kon

I love Satoshi Kon. His films are wildly inventive, with stunning camerawork.

I first watched Paprika in high school, maybe when I was fourteen or fifteen, and I FLIPPED OUT. It was one of the coolest anime I'd ever seen at the time, right up there with Summer Wars. It was so different and weird and fantastical.

There's a beautiful level of artistry Kon has with his films, and Tony Zhou from Every Frame a Painting really sums it up the best. He uses space and time in ways that are insanely creative. From cutting frames down to give just a glimpse of action that will register in the audience's consciousness, to using editing to reveal answers to a question in a non-linear way. Match cuts, jump cuts, seamless background transitions, breaking the 180 rule. All aspects of why Kon is rightfully considered a master filmmaker who pushes the medium to exciting new places.

I agree that American films have... been "inspired" or perhaps "stolen" Kon's work without credit, most noticeably from the scenes with Requiem for a Dream, which were EXACT SHOTS replicated from Perfect Blue, which I found extremely disappointing! I wish Kon's films were more in the public American knowledge because of how American directors have been inspired by him, from Paprika and Inception, to Perfect Blue and Black Swan.

I've never seen Perfect Blue before the bit we watched in class, but oh my god, I was hooked from the moment the movie split between the energetic performance to the mundane clips of Mima in her daily life. The presentation of duality, or the "real vs fake" theme was so interesting, especially how Kon used match cuts of Mima turning to seamlessly interlock these two very different settings together. It's also really cool how much detail he puts in his environments that flesh out his characters. With Mima in her apartment, with all the little knickknacks she has in her room. A lot of Kon's backgrounds in his films are photorealistic - not aesthetically beautifully realistic like a Shinkai film, but just... drenched in reality. He puts that to great contrast whenever he adds something cartoonishly weird like in Paprika, or drenches his realistic scenes in hyper-saturated lighting in scenes of Perfect Blue.

Once these finals are over, I'm definitely sitting down and finishing Perfect Blue.