https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5059-8678
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Abstract
This article offers an examination of Japanese anime director Kon Satoshi’s artistic style, with a particular focus on his presentation of the title credits, by tracing his career as an internationally acclaimed auteur. It argues that Kon’s last film Paprika (2006) can be read as a bold experiment that collapses the distinction between physical existence and media representation, which is manifested at two levels: visually, by the translucent projections of the credits and narratively, by the recurring trope of the butterfly dream. It demonstrates that Kon develops a unique aesthetic over his career that blurs the boundary not only between reality and fiction within the diegetic space, but more significantly between the diegesis (i.e., the fictional universe depicted in the animated films) and the tangible, everyday reality that we dwell in. From the perspective of media ecology, this article proposes to consider the diegetic space, which tends to be treated as a commodity that we unproblematically consume, as something that is thoroughly imbricated in and dialogized with our concrete existence in the physical reality.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ken Yoshida and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I would like to make it clear from the outset that I use “fiction” not in the traditional sense of something fake or inauthentic but rather in the sense of it being mediated.
2 The Japanese word for metamorphosis (in the biological sense) is “hentai,” which echoes the title of the original novel by Takeuchi Yoshikazu (Citation1991): Pāfekuto burū: Kanzen hentai, or Perfect Blue: Total Metamorphosis.
3 Thomas Lamarre (Citation2018) makes a similar move in The Anime Ecology, though with a much different focus on the infrastructure and the forces and relations of distribution.
4 Though it should be noted that the film is littered with miracles and fantastically contrived coincidences, most notably when Hana, one of the three main characters, falls off a rooftop in order to save the baby, a gust of wind, as if blown from heaven, lift them both.
5 It is worth mentioning that Kon also directed a 13-episode TV anime series, Mōsō dairinin (2004, officially translated as Paranoia Agent, though as scholars such as Chris Perkins (Citation2012) and Gerald Figal (Citation2010) have pointed out, mōsō is perhaps better translated as delusion rather than paranoia) between Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika. This TV series shares many of the same themes as Kon’s anime films. In particular, episode 10, which revolves around the tremendous stress and anxiety stemming from anime production, clearly demonstrates Kon’s own metatextual awareness.
6 While the anime film follows the plot of the original novel for the most part, Kon made a few significant changes, such as introducing a perplexing yet visually impressive “dream parade,” combining the two main patients who receive the dream treatment into the same character (Detective Konakawa), as well as expunging the erotic scenes in the novel (while keeping the sexual connotations through suggestive dialogues and visual techniques). For a discussion on Kon’s adaptation of Tsutsui’s novel, see Miyamoto (Citation2019).
7 Some examples among Kon’s films include the photographer Murano’s murder scene in Perfect Blue, in which he is stabbed repeatedly in front of a screen on which the TV drama that Mima appears is shown. Another example can be found in a later scene in Paprika, which I discuss in more detail later in this article. In that scene, Konakawa talks about a film he made in his teens, while the images are projected from offscreen. In both cases, projections are explicitly associated with media.
8 In “Condensing the Media Mix” (Steinberg Citation2012b), Steinberg further contrasts media mix from media convergence, the dominant term in the North American context. While the two terms share many similarities, media convergence is more concerned with transmedia storytelling with a certain sense of cohesion in terms of narratives and settings. Media mix, on the other hand, places more emphasis on the franchising of characters and the affective relationships between fans and characters. Steinberg thus considers the media mix phenomenon to be as much, if not more, about media divergence than about convergence.
9 The concepts of “world” and “variation” have their roots in the kabuki theater. It is worth mentioning that Steinberg, in “Condensing the Media Mix,” asks the important question: “Does not each variation in turn presuppose a different world?” (Steinberg 2012b, 75, emphasis in original). In other words, the element of “variation” is already, to some extent, baked into the very conception of “world” in the first place.
10 My conception of media ecology comes closer to what Steinberg calls “media environment,” which he uses to “designate both the media ecology as a system of media and its lived experience by human subjects” (2021a, xi). In this case, Steinberg uses media ecology in a more traditional sense as denoting the convergence of various media platforms. It seems to me, however, that the “lived experience by human subjects” cannot be separated from the media ecosystem insofar as we are always already imbricated in the latter. Therefore, rather than choosing a different term, I would like to expand the meaning of media ecology to take into account both the multiplicity of media forms and our subjective experiences navigating the mediated world.
11 Tracing the genealogy of the ecological metaphor, Yuriko Furuhata importantly notes the unsettling “conflation of nature and technology through the analogy of media ecology” (2022, 173), both in Japan and in North America. While I fully acknowledge the cybernetic undertone of this term, I consider media ecology to be the most apt framework to work through the complex relationship between media and reality in Kon’s films.
12 In their introduction to Media Convergence in Japan, Patrick Galbraith and Jason Karlin offer a vivid portrayal of such hypermediality in contemporary Japan: “Some look at the screens of their mobile phones, while the attention of others is captured by massive display screens integrated into the sides of buildings. Images of idols flash across those screens and stare down from massive posters plastered onto the sides of buildings. AKB48 is on one screen, HIKAKIN on another; AKB48 is on one poster, Arashi on another. Music from loudspeakers on narrow side streets associated with hip youth culture drifts into scramble crossing” (2016, 23). Though the media landscape described here differs from the one examined in this paper by about a decade, the Japanese society has been adapting to the social and material conditions of a rapidly transforming media environment since as early as the 1960s.
13 In her study on Japanese avant-garde cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, Furuhata notes a similar contiguity between the objective reality and the media representations of it. The bold experiments by filmmakers such as Ōshima Nagisa and Matsumoto Toshio, for example, deliberately mix “the diegetic world of fiction and the extradiegetic, nonfictional world of 1968–69” (Furuhata Citation2013, 79), a time when visual representation cannot be comfortably separated from street politics. Kon’s animated films, to be sure, are not nearly as radical as those discussed by Furuhata, yet I believe there is much in common in terms of the strategies employed in their visual experiments.
14 Christopher Bolton (Citation2018, 171-2) and Melek Ortabasi (Citation2008, 291) made similar arguments in their respective analyses on Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress.
15 See Osmond (Citation2009, 108). Interestingly, Alexander Zons identifies From Russia with Love as one of the rare examples in which the traditionally nondiegetic titles are projected onto the diegetic space (in this case female bodies), which provides “the blueprint for most title sequences of subsequent James Bond films” (2015, 442). It is unclear whether Kon is inspired by the ingenious way of integrating nondiegetic elements into the diegesis in this film.
16 While Kon stays away from any explicit depiction of sex, Tsutsui’s original fiction contains numerous scenes that involve sexual practice and violence. Most significantly, Atsuko treats her patients by satisfying their repressed needs, which are often connected to sexual desires. For a close examination of the different depictions of Atsuko and Paprika in Tsutsui’s fiction and Kon’s adaptation, see Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla (Citation2019). Kon does, however, retain some of the erotic connotations, including a symbolic, though no less disturbing, rape scene by Osanai, Atsuko’s colleague at the Institute. The sexual connotation is less obvious in this precredit scene in the hotel room, though a close look reveals that Paprika’s clothes have changed subtly from her iconic red T-shirt to a hotel robe.
17 Indeed, insofar as Paprika are digitally rendered, the apparently non-pixelated images are also pixelated, even though they are too small to really be noticed.
18 It’s unclear whether the “best friend,” who is always cast in shadow in the film, is a real person or Konakawa’s imagined alter ego, stemming from his guilt for running away from his filmmaking dream. According to Kon, this “film within a film” scene has two sources for visual inspiration: Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s short comic series Run (1979) and Kurosawa Akira’s film Norainu (Stray Dog, Citation1949) (Kon Citation2017, 658-9).
19 Indeed, the storyboard describes this as a “cinema town” (eigakan-gai).
20 This poster replaces that of The Greatest Show on Earth. A careful comparison between cut 757 and cut 337 reveals that all the other billboards are the same as in Konakawa’s previous session, which are posters from the films in the precredit scene, namely Tarzan, From Russia with Love, and Roman Holiday.
21 See Osmond (Citation2009, 106). Osmond also points out its resemblance to a two-dimensional world made of paper cutouts in Paranoia Agent, Kon’s TV anime series.
22 See, for example, Osmond (Citation2009, 116), and Hikawa (Citation2017a, 431). Torrecilla (Citation2019) interprets the symbolism of the butterfly from a different angle. She suggests that the butterfly can be read as a reference to Madame Butterfly, because “Paprika, broken, lies with her butterfly wings (a metaphor for fragility) nailed to a table, showing that the role she plays for Osanai is to be a woman-object who is only worth admiring for her beauty.” Though I find her interpretation less compelling, it is worth mentioning that Kon does evoke Madame Butterfly quite explicitly in one of his early anime projects Magnetic Rose (Kanojo no omoide, 1995), which he scripted. Napier (Citation2006, 24-28) briefly touches on Magnetic Rose in her article “Excuse Me, Who Are You?”.
23 I will not discuss the philosophical implications of the butterfly dream, which is tangential to my main argument. There are numerous studies on the meaning of this famous story. Kai-Yuan Cheng (Citation2014) provides an interesting reading of the tale, as well as a fairly comprehensive survey of previous interpretations.
24 For example, Wang Youru reads the tale as an example of collapsing the distinction “between the person, who is dreaming of being an object, and the object, of which the person is dreaming” (Wang 2000, 353).
25 In fact, the term “metafiction” was popularized in Japan largely as the result of an article titled “Meta-fikushon oboekaki: Tsutsui Yasutaka ron no tame no chiisana josō” (“Metafiction Memorandum: A Small Run-Up for Theorizing Tsutsui Yasutaka,” 1983) by Takahashi Yasunari. In English scholarship, Takayuki Tatsumi (Citation2006) touches on Tsutsui’s metafiction in his book Full Metal Apache, particularly chapter 2 “Comparative Metafiction: Somewhere between Ideology and Rhetoric.”.
26 See Bolton (Citation2018, 170). An English translation of Opus is published by Dark Horse Comics in 2014, which also includes an additional chapter, drawn in rough pencils, that was discovered posthumously.
27 The only difference between fictional constructs and everyday reality, according to Saitō Tamaki (Citation2011, 23-24), is that the former emerges from a consciousness of being mediated, whereas the latter from a consciousness of not being mediated. However, he quickly adds that the difference between a consciousness of being mediated and not being mediated is also merely imaginary.
28 For an English translation, see Christopher Bolton’s translation in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (Saitō Citation2007). For this particular quote, however, I use Vincent’s translation because his rendering of some words, in particular “genjitsu” and “kyokō,” seem slightly more precise to me (2011, xv).
29 On the former, see Patrick Galbraith (Citation2019); on the latter, see Paul Roquet (Citation2022), especially chapter 4.
30 In fact, the provisional title for Kon’s next project is Yume miru kikai (The Dreaming Machines), which would be an adventure film for kids about three cute robots with extensive musical elements. See Hikawa (Citation2017b, 654-5).
31 Perkins, while focusing on Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent, makes similar arguments by suggesting that the apparent visual flatness in Kon’s works doesn’t necessarily detract from ethical depth and moral responsibility.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jiajun Liang
Jiajun Liang is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced. He specializes in modern Japanese literature, film, media, and popular culture. Email: [email protected].