is a 2006 Japanese animated surrealist science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Seishi Minakami.. It is based on the 1993 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui. The Japanese voice cast stars Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Tōru Furuya, Akio Otsuka, Koichi Yamadera, and Hideyuki Tanaka. The film follows a battle between an unknown "dream terrorist" who causes nightmares by stealing a device that allows others to share their dreams, the research psychologist Dr. Atsuko Chiba, and a personality named Paprika—a dream detective who shares Atsuko's mind.
Paprika was Kon's fourth and final feature film before his death in 2010. His co-writer Seishi Minakami had previously written for Kon's TV series Paranoia Agent (2004), while the film's character design and animation director was Masashi Ando, and the music was composed by Kon's frequent collaborator Susumu Hirasawa. The art director was Nobutaka Ike, who worked on all of Kon's projects. Japanese animation studio Madhouse animated and produced the film.
The film had its worldwide premiere at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion. It was released in Japan on November 25, 2006, and received critical acclaim.
Plot In the near future, a newly created device called the DC Mini allows users to view people's dreams. The head of the team working on this treatment, Dr. Atsuko Chiba, begins using the machine illegally to help psychiatric patients outside the research facility by assuming her dream world alter-ego, a detective named Paprika. Atsuko's closest allies are Dr. Toratarō Shima, the chief of the department, and Dr. Kōsaku Tokita, the inventor of the DC Mini.
Paprika counsels a detective named Toshimi Konakawa, who is plagued by a recurring dream regarding an unknown former colleague and a victim in a homicide case he is investigating. She gives Toshimi a card with the name of a website on it, which leads him into a bar where he is able to meet Paprika, who compares the Internet to dreams. In a meeting with the company chairman, Dr. Seijirō Inui, to discuss the theft of three DC Mini prototypes, Toratarō goes on a nonsensical tirade and jumps through a window, nearly killing himself. Upon examining Toratarō's dream, which is a parade of random objects, Kōsaku recognizes his assistant, Kei Himuro, which confirms their suspicion that the theft was an inside job.
While investigating Himuro's home, Atsuko ignores the warnings that Paprika gives her, and accidentally slips into a dream space, which, due to her frequent use of the DC Mini, can now affect her constantly. Atsuko almost dies, after ignoring another warning by Paprika, but is rescued by her co-investigators.
When two other scientists fall victim to the DC Mini, Seijirō bans the use of the device. This fails to hinder the crazed parade, now inside Himuro's dream, which claims Kōsaku. Paprika and Toratarō discover that Himuro is only an empty shell. The real culprit is Seijirō, who believes that he must protect dreams from humankind's influence through dream therapy, with the help of Dr. Morio Osanai. Investigating the demise of the two scientists, Toshimi meets with Atsuko, Toratarō, and Kōsaku. Leaving the meeting, he has an anxiety attack. In an emergency session with Paprika, she reveals the scenes in his dreams each correspond to genres of movies. The parade bursts into Toshimi's dream, prompting Paprika to leave the session to help Kōsaku in Himuro's dream.
Paprika is captured by Seijirō and Morio, who obsessively confesses his love for Atsuko and peels away Paprika's skin to reveal Atsuko underneath. However, he is interrupted by the outraged Seijirō, who demands that they finish off Atsuko. Meanwhile in his dream at the bar, Toshimi learns his recurring dream is based in anxiety over the illness and death of his colleague from his youth whose memory he'd repressed, with whom he aspired to be a film director. Resolving his anxieties, Toshimi finds and enters Himuro's dream and flees with Atsuko back into his own dream. Morio gives chase, which ends in Toshimi shooting Morio. The act kills Morio's physical body in the real world.
Dreams and reality begin to merge. The dream parade runs amok in the city, and reality starts to unravel. Toratarō is nearly killed by a giant doll, but is saved by Paprika, who now appears as a fully separate entity from Atsuko. Amidst the chaos, Kōsaku, in the form of a giant robot, eats Atsuko and prepares to do the same to Paprika. Seijirō, in a megalomaniacal delirium, returns in the form of a giant humanoid nightmare and threatens to darken the world with his delusions. Paprika throws herself into Kōsaku's body. A baby emerges from the robotic shell and consumes Seijirō, aging into a fully-grown combination of Atsuko and Paprika as she does so, then fades away, ending the nightmare.
In the real world, Atsuko sits at Kōsaku's bedside as he wakes up. Toshimi later visits the website from Paprika's card and receives a message from Paprika, suggesting the film Dreaming Kids to him. He enters a cinema and purchases a ticket for Dreaming Kids.
Cast Megumi Hayashibara as , an attractive and modest psychiatrist and researcher at the Institute for Psychiatric Research. She uses the DC Mini to treat her clients inside their dreams under the guise of her alter ego . Chiba is voiced by Cindy Robinson in the English dub. Tōru Furuya as , the childish and obese inventor of the DC Mini. He is a former friend of the DC Mini thief Himuro and a close colleague of Chiba, whom he often affectionately calls "At-chan". Tokita is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal in the English dub. Tōru Emori as , the paraplegic chairman of the Institute for Psychiatric Research. He is hostile toward the development of the DC Mini due to the danger he believes it poses. Inui is voiced by Michael Forest in the English dub. Katsunosuke Hori as , the cheerful and friendly chief of staff at the Institute for Psychiatric Research and an ally of Chiba. Shima is voiced by David Lodge in the English dub. Akio Otsuka as , a friend of Shima and a client of Paprika. He is haunted by a recurring dream that stems from an anxiety neurosis. He is infatuated with Paprika. Konakawa is voiced by Paul St. Peter in the English dub. Koichi Yamadera as , a staff member of the Institute for Psychiatric Research who harbors feelings for Chiba but is frustrated by her ignorance of him and jealous of Tokita's talent. Osanai is voiced by Doug Erholtz in the English dub. Hideyuki Tanaka as "That Guy", a slightly obscured man who appears in Konakawa's recurring nightmare. Satomi Kōrogi as a Japanese doll that frequently appears in the collective nightmare. Daisuke Sakaguchi as Kei Himuro, a friend and assistant of Tokita and a suspect in the theft of the DC Mini. Himuro is voiced by Brian Beacock in the English dub. Mitsuo Iwata as Dr. Yasushi Tsumura, a scientist who falls victim to the DC Mini thief. Rikako Aikawa as Dr. Nobue Kakimoto, a scientist who falls victim to the DC Mini thief. Yasutaka Tsutsui as Kuga, one of the two Radio Club bartenders. Satoshi Kon as Jinnai, one of the two Radio Club bartenders.
Music
The soundtrack was released on 23 November 2006 under the TESLAKITE label. It was composed by Susumu Hirasawa. A bonus movie was included with the CD.
The soundtrack is notable for being one of the first film scores to use Vocaloid (Lola as the "voicebank") for vocals. It's also the last of Hirasawa's albums where an Amiga computer was used for composition. All MIDI was sequenced through an Amiga 4000 running the Bars n Pipes program.
Production Due to the small scale of release, both Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers had a hard time recouping their investment funds. However, Kon's name had become known among the film industry by the time of the Paprika project, and his reputation had already been established, so the film was produced.
After finishing his first film, Perfect Blue, Kon was planning to make his next film, Paprika, with the producer of the company that financed it, but the project was ruined when the company, Rex Entertainment, went bankrupt. However, the idea of Paprika was in Kon's mind as early as 1998, and his attempts to depict the ambiguities and shaky boundaries between "illusion and reality" and "memory and reality" in his directorial debut Perfect Blue and his original film Millennium Actress were actually because he wanted to visually portray a dynamic like the novel Paprika.
Later, when he met with the author, Yasutaka Tsutsui, and received his permission to make the film, Kon stated that he felt as if he had realized what he had always imagined.
Unlike Perfect Blue, which was also based on a novel, Kon didn't change the fundamental parts of the original in Paprika, but he did change some parts of the novel to fit the movie. For two reasons, Kon thought that the original could not be adapted into a movie. One reason was that the novel Paprika was too voluminous to fit into a single film, and the other reason was that over ten years had already passed since the novel was published, and many creators had already embodied the ideas inspired by Paprika in various media, not just in films. Therefore, Kon decided to first make the original into a simple form, and then incorporate ideas from the original as well as from Tsutsui's other works into the frame. Kon believed that the charm of the original lay in the dream scenes, and that the film would only be complete if the dream world was portrayed in rich detail with expressions that he believed only visual images could provide. The descriptions of dreams in the novel were supplemented by explanations in the text. However, in the case of visual works, which show the images of dreams flowing one after another, explanation would hinder the flow.
In order to create a glamorous image for the entire film, and still devote enough time to portraying the dream scenes without introducing the characters, Kon, in contrast to the previous film, used voice actors who were well known for their voice acting and whom he deemed to fit the characters' image.
The budget was approximately 300 million yen, and the production took about two and a half years from planning to completion.
Themes Like Kon's other works, this film uses the motif of "fiction and reality" to depict a world in which seamlessly connected dreams and reality are violently switched, and the boundary between fiction and reality becomes indistinct, in a uniquely realistic manner.
For Kon, "fiction" and "reality" are not opposing concepts, but both are homogeneous in the sense that they are both "painted things," and the only thing that separates the two is "what is drawn there." Kon rarely traced real scenes when he drew, and he wanted his pictures to be more abstract than realistic, so that they would "look like that." In other words, the screen full of reality that the audience feels as if it is real is just a "picture" for Kon, and because it is animation, there is essentially no distinction between reality and fiction in its expression. This gap is what gives birth to the "tricks" that support Satoshi Kon's works. The relationship between "fiction and reality" in Kon's work is that real pictures that make you forget that they are pictures are "reality" first, and then arrange them in the same position as reality and fiction in the form of "actually this was a picture (fiction)", and it is an illusion unique to anime. However, what makes this work different from Kon's other works is that it has a deeper relationship between "dream" and "reality," where "dream" and "reality" are each transformed into the existence of the other.