I like anime. Well, a some of it anyway. I’m just barely old enough to remember with fondness Star Blazers, a little of the original Speed Racer. And afternoon classics like Voltron(both the space ships and the lions) and Tranzor Z were two of my favorites shows as a kid. Of course when you have a girl robot that shoots rocket tits at bad guys like in Tranzor Z, that is guaranteed to be appealing to any eight year old boy.

 Now that being said, I’m not a rabid fun of the stuff. I love Akira, which is the cream of the anime crop, and Cowboy Bebop is definitely one of my favorite shows of all time. And every once and a while I come across another one that grabs me for a little while, like the Paranoia Agent series did last year.

But it seems for each Ghost in the Shell or Blood: The Last Vampire that’s out there, there seems to be ten more anime shows or films that quite frankly do nothing for me. Like the quasi-pedophilic Sailor Moon, and all that dumb shit they usually play on Adult Swim for the last hour on weekdays. Or Metropolis, which while interesting, just wasn’t for me with all its cutesy-wootsy characters. I just can’t get into cute very often.

And then there’s the other anime extreme, where the story seems to take a back seat to some really, down right dirty hardcore stuff. Stuff that makes Vampire Hunter D look like Sesame Street. Seriously. NC-17 doesn’t even begin to rate it. I hesitate to describe some of things I have seen in anime, both of a violent and depraved sexual nature; let’s just leave it at there are some really fucked up people making anime in Japan.

But you gotta give any new anime film that comes out a chance, because you never know. You could always stumble across something really special. I have a friend who hates anime as a rule, but swears by Spirited Away as one of her all time favorite movies. Again, a little too cute for me, but I appreciate how good it is.

And Paprika is close to that level. Paprika is the story of a group of government researchers, and their invention, called the DC mini, which allows them to enter into and record people’s dreams. The main character is Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a cold, officious woman by day, whose alter ego, named Paprika, is some kind of free spirited ‘dream detective’, who we see using a DC mini to help troubled veteran cop Det. Toshimi to cope with his inner conflicts.

All well and good so far. It’s easy to see how such a tool could be very useful in psychoanalysis. But unfortunately it also can be used as a weapon against people, invading their dream worlds and subverting them to a master dream, to the point of having that dream world take over a person’s reality while awake. And that is exactly what is happening. Atsuko and her colleagues realize that someone has stolen one of the DC minis and is using it to attack them, slowly growing more and more powerful. Now this evil force must be unmasked and stopped, before the whole world falls under its odd and twisted grasp.

Now if you’re going to making a film where the vast majority of its takes place in the dream world, you really are best served doing it in anime. No other genre out there has shown the ability to really have no limits to what can be seen or done, as long as it can be imagined. And this film really does go way out to the limit. There are a lot of real mind bending moments, as characters flip from place to place in their dreams, as well as between the real world and the dream world, often with little or no advance notice. Eventually it gets so extreme that there is not only no way to tell what is real and what isn’t, there’s no relevant difference between the two. Really, Philip K. Dick would’ve been proud.

I love this kind of thing when done right. And Paprika is definitely done right. Especially key for it working so well here is the way its able to keep a certain delirious kind of logic to what goes on, even as it gets more and more chaotic, when the imagery and symbolism from different people’s dreams start to mix. That’s a very tight balancing act, but also absolutely necessary. You have to always have a sense of logic of some form, no matter what else goes on. Its why so often these kinds of things fail, because filmmakers sometimes think all they need to do is pull some motif out of the proverbial hat and just stick it in there randomly. They think that’s being creative, but in reality that’s just being lazy. It doesn’t matter how out there you want to get, how abstract; there has to be some kind of logic and rationale present. Even if the audience isn’t fully aware of it, they need to kind of have an intuitive sense of its presence. Without it, it wouldn’t matter how dynamic the imagery got, it would be boring and pointless.

(Okay, I know some of you hardcore film kids out there just brought up Un Chien Andalou as you read that last paragraph to refute me. First off, stop talking to yourself. Second off, I know very well what Dali and Bunuel were trying to do, just as I also know that they ultimately failed exactly because of the reasons stated above.)

(And now I know that you non-hardcore film kids out there just asked, “What the hell is Un Chien Andalou?” Don’t worry, its not important. Just a little silly film kid talk.)

And thankfully the filmmakers here apparently knew this, and they made sure all the abstraction had a solid basis in something about at least one of the characters. That way none of it felt like a useless bit of fluff, no matter how mixed and jumbled it eventually got. They really should be applauded in the care they took in doing this.

Although its not all hugs and kisses for this film. I do have little things about it that didn’t quite work for me. Even though the animation was at the always high level of contemporary anime, it did rely too much for my taste on the cartoonish archetype’s for some of its characters. The wise old professor who’s apparently about three feet tall with the huge eyes under his glasses- this guy seems to get cast in every anime film these days. Not to mention the techie genius, who is so fat he passed morbidly obese about half a ton ago. Sure, have a wise old man and an overweight techie genius, that works, but I would have liked them to illustrate all the real people more naturalistically to accentuate the surreal stuff that happens more.

And I felt a little that the story itself was as clear as it could have been. I admit I did have a bit of trouble following the story. And in some ways it seemed a little too superficial. Of course with this kind of film the story often only needs to be superficial, as it’s the imagery that important. But there just felt like things that were not really explained that could have been. Maybe a little more on how the DC mini worked. Or how exactly its abusive use was possible to start with. I’m not entirely sure the filmmakers themselves worked that out in their own heads. And it would’ve been nice.

But that cold just be my problem more than the film’s. This isn’t meant to be a film about everything making sense, inner logic aside. Or is it a deep character study. Paprika really is at its core a basic and admittedly decent excuse for some old fashioned surrealistic eye candy, which this film definitely is. So if you’re like me, and you like to grapple with a little drug free mind bending every once and a while, then Paprika is definitely worth a watch.