Perfect Blue - Why Satoshi Kon's Classic Film Is More Relevant Now
Legendary film director Satoshi Kon died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 before 1997's Perfect Blue gained its cult following. The distribution company for the movie went bankrupt, and despite winning awards at a few film festivals went largely unnoticed in comparison to his other films, such as Millennium Actress in 2001, Tokyo Godfathers in 2003, and Paprika in 2006, the latter of which is often suspected to be an inspiration for the film Inception, with some fans even claiming Inception as either a homage or direct rip-off of Kon's own film about using technology to enter a shared dreamscape that came out four years prior.
Kon's other films aside, Perfect Blueis often considered an existential masterpiece. It features a protagonist named Mima, who after leaving her life as a J-Pop idol behind struggles to find who she is, blurring the lines between her idol personality and her true self. It examines the toxicity of Japanese idol culture of the time, as well as subsequently similar forms of obsessive celebrity culture, and how making a commodity of real, human people can have disastrous psychological consequences on the person being idolized.
Inu-Oh: What to Know About a Legendary Anime DIrector's Upcoming Final Film
It was initially based on a novel with the same title, however, after seeing someone else's script for the film based off the book he asked if he could change it. Initially intended to be a horror slasher, the original author only asked Satoshi Kon to keep three main tenants «the main character is a B-grade idol, she has a stalker, and it is a horror film. He turned it into a completely different story, thus creating a film featuring social commentary and his own original story out of the three tenants the
Read more on gamerant.com
