Paprika

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Year:	2006
Country of origin:	Japan
Director:	Satoshi Kon
Genre:	Dream-like anime
Starring:	Megumi Hayashibara, Tôru Furuya, Kôichi Yamadera
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0851578/
Tagline:	This is your brain on anime.
Favourite line:	N/A - Subtitled

Animated psyche-sci-fi from Nippon-koku.

The plot:
It’s the near future, and a psychologist, Doctor Atsuko Chiba, starts using an experimental piece of technology known as the DC Mini to try to help her patients.
One patient, a detective, is particularly troubled by a recurring dream that seems tied up with his anxieties about a murder case he struggling to solve.
Entering his dreams using the DC Mini, Chiba adopts her alter ego, Paprika but, unbeknownst to her, several other devices have been stolen and now it seems the dream states of various individuals are merging together to form a new reality, which may or may not explode into the real world, or may just remain as dreams, or may not even exist at all.
Can Chiba solve the riddle of the detectives dream state?
Why does the fat guy manifest as a walking robot?
And just what is it with the terrifying child-geisha that seems to invade everyone’s dreams?

This is weird, kids, so there’s two ways to approach it.
1 – Try to wrap your head around what is actually happening whilst simultaneously attempting to not get frustrated.
2 – Stop trying to figure it out after a while, and just sit back and enjoy the visuals.
I went for option two, and had a jolly good old time as a result.
With a veritable riot of imagination on show, this is about sensory stimulation, the music and the visuals designed to feel deliberately trippy, deliberately other-worldly, as is befitting a film about dreams.
Plot wise, well, it is tough going, as every time you think you’ve got a handle on what is happening, a new oddity is thrown in, a fresh weirdness to attempt to process so, like I say, just give up and go with it.
Inevitably, I would always urge you to watch the subtitled version- assuming you don’t speak Japanese, of course – as the voice actors selected for animated movies tend to miss the point entirely, and speak as if addressing ‘special’ children, which is really infuriating.
If you’ve not seen any anime before, I tell you what, there are worse places to start.