Flashes of Panic

It’s interesting to me that when I leave movies, I tend to be thinking about whether or not I saw an interesting or entertaining story. But tonight, leaving Paprika, I realized that I had seen something—that the images that made up the movie made such a strong impression that the story and its myriad overlapping details barely mattered.

I won’t even try to explain the plot; I didn’t understand lots of it anyway. It’s in Japanese, with subtitles, and I couldn’t keep everyone’s names straight, and a large part of the story hinges on the fact that the characters slip in and out of each others’ dreams like walking into different rooms. There’s science fiction (“speculative fiction”) and something of a mystery, plus enough of a love story (four men, two women, but are they one woman, and which one?) to keep things from settling in any one place. But it’s like going to a really good concert with your eyes, or seeing what a good race feels like; you become so engaged in the flow of the images that everything else fades away. The end is like stopping, or like surfacing.

It also makes a pretty powerful argument for this Newsweek reviewer (who feels pretty much the same way I do about the movie: “You wake from it as if from a dream: spooked, provoked and exhilarated.”) Why do we market animation only to children in America, when movies like this are possible? (It’s rated R somewhat more plausibly than Once, which got its rating for language; this one includes undressed cartoons, no more offensive than a good museum, but also some mildly disturbing images.)

Anyway, look, don’t take my word for it. I’m dancing about architecture here. Go see it, and really see something.

Now Playing: The Dawn Patrol from Tarantula by Ride

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