One Shot | “Paprika”

One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.

Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006).

More than a decade ago, Satoshi Kon’s premature death left a vacuum in the animation world. Not many directors so intuitively understood how the form could convey cinematic subjectivity, or were as imaginative in their experimentation. He used character designs that were unusually realistic for anime, then found ways to fray that realism. Think of a man vomiting scrawled katakana in Paranoia Agent (2004), or a nighttime chase in which a murderous specter appears to sail across rooftops in Perfect Blue (1997). In Kon’s cinema, the boundaries between reality, dreams, imagination, and memory are in constant flux.

The lead character of Kon’s final completed feature, Paprika (2006), is a psychiatrist who treats patients with an experimental device that lets her enter their minds as they sleep; the title refers to the mischievous persona she assumes within that headspace. At no point are the viewers or characters safe in assuming that what they see is part of waking or dreaming life. Though the film is full of bravura set pieces, the opening credits sequence encapsulates Kon’s mastery of animated transitions. 

The credits play over a montage of Paprika traversing Tokyo. It begins simply enough, with her driving a scooter down a freeway, but then she projects herself onto the decal on a passing truck depicting a woman riding a rocket. She replaces the image of the woman, and the rocket springs to life and launches into the sky. From there, Paprika strolls through different billboards, emerges from a computer monitor, skips in ghostly form through an office building, and stops traffic in an intersection by snapping her fingers before taking a break to eat a cheeseburger. When two guys in the diner hit on her, her reflections in four mirrors each display a different disgusted reaction. She then escapes their attention in the sequence’s single most mind-bending moment.

In a wide shot, Paprika exits the restaurant as a roller-blading guy chatting on his cellphone approaches. When he skates by, Paprika leaps behind him and vanishes, leaving the leering men to look around confusedly. The skater comes into sharper focus as he moves closer, and we can now see that the graphic on his shirt is an image of Paprika, which soon fills the screen. When it does, Paprika jumps back as if from a mild impact. Standing on a different street, framed in a medium shot, she gives the audience a brief knowing glance. All this happens across seven seconds, just long enough to be legible but so quick that it’s thrillingly disorienting.

This is a scene transition without much cinematic precedent, but it’s reminiscent of how comic books structure space and time through panel layouts—Kon was, of course, a mangaka as well as a filmmaker. Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) is something of a forebear, with Keaton’s projectionist entering the movie he’s projecting during a dream, his misadventures playing out on a screen inside the screen in an early example of metafictional cinema. The use of an image-within-an-image seamlessly becoming the image itself recalls a famous moment from Contact (1997), in which an unbroken shot of a girl running through a house is finally (and impossibly) revealed to be unfolding on the mirror of a medicine cabinet she flings open. Accomplishing such effects has required precise camera setups and compositing effects, though by the time a shot tracking Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan became a reflection in his enemy’s goggles in Spider-Man 2 (2004), CGI had come to replace many practical techniques, moving live action ever closer to pure animation. Paprika’s T-shirt transition is a standout example of how Kon’s films demand the audience acquiesce to a freeform sensibility, relinquishing our grip on linearity. The point of view jumping from one space to another that’s nested within it is an apt metonym for Paprika’s use of layered dreams. The film Kon constructs is simply the outermost dream, one shared with the audience.