(2007; Japanese with English version of voices) This fantastic, visually spectacular, amazing animation from director Satoshi Kon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Seishi Minakami, based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel (in the Japanese version, Satoshi and Yasutaka provided the voices for the bartenders, Jin-nai and Kuga) is my favorite anime.

The DC Mini, an invention of Dr Kosaku Tokita (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal), the century's greatest genius (though his powerful mind's trapped inside an obese adolescent's body incapable of restraining its appetite) - an experimental device, intended as a technological tool for psychiatric therapy (in which people's illnesses could be treated by examining their dreams) not yet perfected but capable of capturing a person's dreams onto a computer's hard-drive like movies - has been stolen from the lab.

Under the supervision of Dr Torataro Shima (David Lodge), chief of the experimental program and an old friend from their college days, and the guidance of a perky avatar Paprika (Cindy Robinson), Detective Toshimi Konakawa (Paul St. Peter) has been permitted to experience the DC Mini (though he's sworn to secrecy about its existence) during which his dreams morph from a circus scene (where a friend at the center ring magically captures his body inside a cage) to himself as Tarzan swinging on a vine through the jungle to an espionage thriller … to a corridor with a corpse floating towards the carpet (representing the anxiety he feels toward a homicide case).

Unfortunately, Dr Tokita neglected to prevent open access to the device by anyone aware of its potential; Dr Shima becomes its first victim when a mentally-disturbed patient's dream gets implanted into the chief's subconscious, barely surviving a manic outburst that drives him to leap through a window. The first suspect of the theft is Kei Himuro (Brian Beacock), Dr Tokita's assistant, who in the guise of a doll in the dreamworld proclaims himself protector of all dreams.

The Internet and dreams are similar, allowing Det Konakawa to meet with Paprika privately behind a bar tended by Jin-nai and Kuga; the cop also has a phobic dislike of watching movies (though when he was 17, he and his friend produced a short film of a cop chasing but unable to catch his quarry). With Paprika, taking an elevator to the 17th floor of his inner-fantasy life, Konakawa confronts the truth of his fears: "It looks like I killed myself."

Concerned about Dr Chiba Atsuko (the actual person associated with her spicy alter ego Paprika), asleep and vulnerable if anything should happen to her spry avatar, Dr Shima helplessly watches on his monitor as conditions inside Himuro's subconscious, where Paprika has gone in an attempt to save the damaged researcher, turn chaotic - a tumultuous parade of colorful floats with toys, appliances, and all the detritus of dreams swells through the streets of the city of being - merging with other dreams (Tokita's and Konakawa's), becoming intricately entwined, expanding exponentially, colliding with reality, creating (in the words of the chairman) "one gigantic delusion."

The old chairman's youthful sycophant, Dr Morio Osanai (Doug Erholtz), who dutifully does the boss's bidding, cannot control his lust for Paprika, trapping her like a butterfly in a lepidopterist's collection.

"The guardian of all dreams," who regards them as sacred, not to be tampered with by technology, rises from the ruins with unbounded freedom, limitless opportunity to correct what he sees as the flaws of the cosmos; his opposite (for there is always a contrapositive in the universal debate of logical argumentation), enlarging by swallowing up the waste, courageously challenges his supremacy.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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