September 30, 2005

Paranoia Agent

I've just finished watching an anime series called Paranoia Agent. I am not a fan of anime, as almost everything that people have recommended to me has left me unimpressed. I tried Akira, Ninja Scroll, Ghost In the Shell, Legend of the Overfiend, Cowboy Bebop... At best I was amused by the pretty pictures but unmoved by the stories and characters; at worst I was utterly repelled. (Cowboy Bebop has great music, though.)

The two big exceptions are the films of Hayao Miyazaki & Satoshi Kon. (I also loved a short called Voices Of A Distant Star, but that seemed to be very much a one-off.) Miyazaki probably qualifies as one of the world's greatest living filmmakers. Kon is a fairly new filmmaker but his storytelling style and aesthetic sense appeal to me very much, and he directed this entire series based on his own stories.

Satoshi Kon previously made three features: Perfect Blue (the first anime movie I really liked), Millenium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers. He has claimed that the series was initiated because he wanted a forum for ideas that he didn't have room for in his series. While there are episodes of Paranoia Agent that do seem to be derived from each movie, for the most part this series is its own beast. This is appropriate for his career as those first three movies, while unmistakably the work of the same filmmaker, are radically different in tone, content and genre from one another: the first is a vicious psychological thriller, the second is a lush romantic fantasy, and the third is a charming Christmas story that's thankfully free of syrupy sentiment.

But on to Paranoia Agent. I don't really know how weird these things usually get but Paranoia Agent is pretty fucking weird. The basic premise is that a kid on rollerblades is skating around Tokyo beaning people with a golden baseball bat. All the victims are connected in some way, and all are under heavy levels of stress and seem weirdly relieved after Shonen Bat (as he's called - or "Lil' Slugger" in the lame English dub I briefly sampled) gives them the bash.

Each episode focuses on a different character, and it's not clear at first what the connection between everything is. The show manages to be funny, disturbing, cutesy, scary, satirical, intelligent, and goofy - often all in one episode. Some parts are parodies of anime conventions I recognise, and some seem to parody conventions I don't recognise.

It's very much of a piece with Satoshi Kon's other work, even aside from the episodes that reference Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers explicitly.

There's a total of thirteen 24-minute episodes (spread a bit too thin over 4 dvds), and the final disc just came out here yesterday. I enjoyed every single episode, although there were definite highlights. I preferred the dark and disturbing parts to the cutesy and funny parts, but I think this was partly just personal taste and partly that I didn't get all the jokes.

The animation (although limited in detail) covers just about every different anime style I've seen. The realistic-ish style of Perfect Blue dominates, but the range of styles is sometimes dizzying. It's always pointed - sometimes it seems to be straight parody, but more often the different styles reflect different mental states. Any of Satoshi Kon's movies could conceivably be made in live-action, but I would argue that they could not be as effective in that medium.

All in all I loved it, although it really didn't inspire me to seek out more anime. I'll definitely continue following Satoshi Kon's career though - he is unquestionably my kind of filmmaker, in any genre.

Posted by pearce at September 30, 2005 1:19 PM
Comments

Ha ha ha, guess I won't be watching the director's commentary this weekend as I'd planned to.

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