Paprika

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More About

• Satoshi Kon
• Yasutaka Tsutsui
• Atsuko Chiba
• Anime and Manga
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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Based on a serialized novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, this loopy 2007 anime from director Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress) isn’t a movie that’s meant to be understood so much as simply experienced—or maybe dreamed. Here’s what I know for sure (and plot-wise, it isn’t much): Our psychotherapist superheroine Paprika, a.k.a. Dr. Atsuko Chiba, learns that her laboratory’s dream machine, the DC-Mini, has gone missing. So she goes looking for the errant device, digitally jacking into her colleagues’ dreams and discovering clues that include menacing geisha dolls and the recurring nightmare of a guilt-ridden police detective—who happens to hate movies. Like the best work of Kon’s compatriots Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), Paprika is a film in which, minute to minute, basically anything can happen; the narrative is almost completely unbound. But Kon wouldn’t be his genre’s supreme self-reflexivist if he didn’t insist on revealing frames within the frame—which here include not just characters’ dreams, but movie and laptop screens, plus a Planet Hollywood-esque elevator that stops on floors devoted to Tarzan and James Bond. (R) ROB NELSON
April 22-28, 7:30 & 9 p.m.; Sat., April 23, 5 p.m.; Sun., April 24, 5 p.m., 2011