Anime Club: Perfect Blue

Hello everybody! For today’s anime club we have another Satoshi Kon film, Perfect Blue.

PERFECT BLUE

DIRECTOR: Satoshi Kon

STARRING: Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto, Shinpachi Tsuji, Masaaki Ōkura

GENRE: Animated, Psychological Thriller, Horror

YEAR: 1997

COUNTRY: Japan

Mima was a pop idol, worshipped by the masses until fashion dictated otherwise. In order to salvage her career, she is advised to drop music and pursue acting. A soap opera role is offered but Mima’s character is less clean cut than desired. Regardless, she agrees and events take a turn for the worse.

She begins to feel reality slip, that her life is not her own. She discovers (imagines) her identical twin, a mirror image that hasn’t given up singing. Internet sites appear describing every intimate detail of her life and a figure stalks her from the shadows. Her friends and associates are threatened (and killed) as Mima descends into a dangerous world of paranoid delusion. She fears for her life and must unravel fact from illusion in order to stay alive.

Alright, im going to compare Perfect Blue here to Paprika, as both films were created by Satoshi Kon. Stylistically, you can see the differences between each one of the films, slowly improving with each new venture. You can really see the difference between the years, whether it be advances in technology or in the art of story telling. 

Story wise, I wasn’t as enthralled with Perfect Blue as I had hoped. It didn’t catch my attention fully until about the 45 min mark. I could have cared less about the plot until then. I also didn’t particularly care for the main character Mima either. I thought that she could have been developed more, but I did enjoy seeing her slowly go insane yet try to keep her bearings.

PROS:

•  Two very different stlyes.
• Animation.
• Satoshi Kon surrealism.
• Anime + psychological horror done right.

CONS:

•  Didn’t grab full attention.
• Mima characterization.

SCORE:6.5/10

If you have any suggestions for films/TV/Games/Music/Anime for me to review, drop me a comment!

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