Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist (2021) - full transcript

One, please.

Of all the people I've worked with,

nobody else provides

the unique sensations he does.

Satoshi Kon broadened the scope

of animation.

He created animated films

that were as powerful

as live-action films.

That's the overriding impression

I get from his work.

To sum it up,

he was a prickly guy.

He spoke his mind.

Even if the other person might get hurt,

he never held back.

He said what he wanted to say.

He was radical that way.

I remember that well.

I'd never seen

the Japanese style of animation

used just for a real adult, dramatic story.

It was very clear

he was this kind of one-man machine.

It felt like

he just kind of did his thing

in his cocoon, and created his work.

That was my feeling of his genius.

For me, Satoshi Kon

was not just a great director.

He was also

a great mentor and teacher,

as well as an activist

who was trying to improve

the animation industry

for its creators.

He had this ability

to make the audience smart.

You can't leave your brain

on the couch with his work.

He's an osteopath for the brain.

Always ahead of us.

This is a filmmaker who's expanding

the boundaries of film making.

And not just animation.

A lot of people in live action

are chasing the Satoshi Kon feel,

that level of immersiveness.

He's a master.

Someone I'll be learning from

for the rest of my life.

Kon, in a word,

is a genius.

And a nasty guy.

In a nutshell.

SATOSHI KON: THE ILLUSIONIST

On August 24th, 2010, at the age of 46,

mangaka and filmmaker

Satoshi Kon died.

His body of work is not immense.

A handful of comics,

four feature films,

one short, and a TV series.

But his contribution

to the history of animation,

and Japanese cinema in general,

is fundamental.

He even influenced

Hollywood cinema in the 2010s.

Satoshi Kon's broken trajectory

is that of a visionary

and essential early 21st century artist.

I refuse to do it!

In 1998,

Perfect Blue, Kon's first feature,

is released worldwide...

The film is a thriller

about a young pop singer

harassed by a fan when she decides

to quit the music industry.

The film's daring narrative

and dark, tense atmosphere

make it an instant classic

of adult animated cinema

and catapult Kon

onto the international stage.

Born in 1963,

Satoshi Kon began

writing and drawing mangas as a boy.

He was first published

at the age of 22.

It all began

when I was in art school.

I planned to become a mangaka.

When I started out in the profession,

I was already a fervent admirer

of Katsuhiro Otomo's mangas, like Akira.

His style inspired me in my own comics.

In my mangas and animated films,

the core of my personal vision

is clearly influenced by Otomo.

Other magazines for young people

were mostly read by

students and office workers.

White collar, basically.

Whereas Young Magazine

tended to be read

by blue-collar workers

and young slackers.

Kon's first two award-winning mangas

were works of science fiction.

They were clearly influenced by Otomo.

What's most important in drawing

is expressivity.

I was his supervisor at the time.

I was very impressed

by the power of his drawings.

Foreign filmmakers took an interest

in Kon's early mangas.

Marc Caro, whose films with Jeunet

were popular in Japan,

hoped to bring

the most popular one to the screen.

Why was I interested in Kaikisen?

I felt the story was so timeless,

so international..

You could place it in any context.

This conflict between tradition

and a kind of raging modernity

hurtling towards who knows what...

It felt very current.

The relationship to the sea,

the mermaids,

all the sea-related mythology...

I was hooked from the start.

So, obviously, I met Satoshi Kon.

It turned out, we both

admired each other.

And we had a lot in common.

I had a great story to tell.

And, on top of that,

I had the blessing and enthusiasm

of the person I admired,

who'd written the story.

I was beyond overjoyed!

Satoshi Kon

was already known at the time.

I wasn't the one

who discovered his talent.

It was already clear to everybody.

I made him an offer.

The timing was good for both of us.

It was the beginning

of a very important collaboration.

And now, without further ado,

please welcome CHAM!

The first meeting with Mr. Takeuchi,

the author of the original book,

took place at Madhouse studio.

He was very frank.

He gave us permission

to modify his book.

So we had a lot of freedom.

It was a suspenseful book,

with a heavy dose of the grotesque.

Mr. Kon and I decided

we wanted to do something different.

So, what would we do?

Mr. Kon wrote down a few notes.

"A man pursues a woman,

"a woman pursues her own shadow."

As we wrote down all those notes,

we decided that would be

our concept for the film.

Perfect Blue quickly stood out.

In particular,

on the international stage.

It was seen as the work of an auteur.

Satoshi Kon began to be seen

as a major animated filmmaker.

But when you place it in the context

of what Madhouse produced in the 90s,

it's very coherent.

It corresponds exactly

to what Maruyama was trying to do.

Animated films for older audiences.

Darker,

with a more realistic aesthetics.

I suggested

we try cutting it in pieces

and mixing it all up,

so we wouldn't know where we were going.

He said,

"We gotta try it!"

He was up for the challenge.

It's me, Mima Kirigoe from CHAM!

When I met Satoshi Kon,

I could see that he didn't know

I'd started out as an idol.

That made me happy.

Perfect Blue latched onto

the Japanese phenomenon

of forming musical groups

with the express intention of creating idols.

Casting bands of future idols.

The film asks Japanese audiences

to ponder

the fates of these young women,

so quickly discarded,

and whose short careers

expose them to harsh public scrutiny.

Idols must always be smiling.

We have to sing and dance,

even with a fever.

Idols are like puppets.

And in their private lives,

they are all the more tormented.

I was happy that Satoshi Ken

had taken an interest in it.

These very smiley idols

were popular in the 1980s.

They were wildly popular.

They were on all the TV shows.

Then came the 1990s

and the "Underground Idol" craze.

The distance between

idols and their fans narrowed.

A fax?

Who can that be?

Traitor traitor tRaitoR TRAiTor TrAItOR

Who are you?

I myself had to deal with a stalker.

I brought that anxiety to my acting.

It was surely what made me stand out

during the audition.

Perfect Blue is a

really, really good horror movie.

And as a horror movie, you can

connect to it many different ways.

You can compare it

to Alfred Hitchcock,

you can link it to Dario Argento,

you can link it to the maze-like movies

that you get with some

of the David Lynch work.

What's striking in Perfect Blue

is the way Satoshi Kon

appeals to the audience's

intelligence and imagination.

Is Mima an idol?

Did Mima dream she was a celebrity?

Is Mima being pursued

by a psycho killer?

Is the head of Mima's talent agency

killing everyone around her?

A variety of possible worlds

exist within the linear story

of Perfect Blue.

The film seems to say that all these fictional

states are simultaneously co-existing.

As the film goes on,

you do get the sense...

of an escalating nightmare.

The situation is getting

more and more menacing.

There's a feeling of hysteria.

As with Mima, you start

to feel the sanity slipping away.

And I just remember thinking,

"This film is too disturbing for me."

I don't like this.

I don't think

I like the director either.

Because it seems as though, why does

he have to torment this girl so much?

Why does she have to suffer so much?

Why does he have to portray so much?

I think it literally was day one,

I spoke with him

and I asked him about Perfect Blue.

"Your portrayal of women

isn't always nice."

And he says,

"That's because they're me."

I was like,

"That's very interesting."

He said, "I don't know why,

but when I represent myself in a film..."

He said

he himself is always in his movies.

Especially with Perfect Blue.

Mima is Satoshi Kon.

The psychological torment

that Mima is going through

is the torment he has experienced

with the politics

of the anime and the

comic book industry.

So that's when my perspective

of him totally changed.

The first time I saw the film,

I couldn't stop crying.

My thoughts were all over place.

I felt it was good

to have made this film.

That my family might be surprised.

I felt joy, but I was also worried.

All these thoughts

swirling in my head.

Some said the film was original.

They said it was very striking,

and that it left a strong impression.

I can't say that the world of anime

thought much of the film.

To be blunt – we lost money.

I think I met him

before I saw the work.

My memory is I met him when I was in Japan

promoting my first movie, Pi.

Which probably was in 1998.

They were like,

"There's a filmmaker."

I'm not sure why, but we got together

and we had a meal.

I think we went

to a tempura restaurant.

I remember him talking to me

a little bit about a movie.

I was very interested in anime.

I didn't really quite--

It was early days in anime,

at least for Westerners.

I think, shortly after that,

I did see Perfect Blue.

I was blown away by it, it was fantastic.

And it was very different

than any other anime I had seen.

Bastards!

In Requiem for a Dream,

I was probably in the script process.

I was looking for a scene

to get the internal mindset

of Jennifer Connelly's character Mary.

And probably at the same time,

I saw Perfect Blue.

And I remember writing

to Satoshi in Japan,

saying,

"Hey, would you mind if I used

one of your shots, in homage to you,

"but it would help

this moment in my film."

He was very flattered.

I remember he was fine,

and generous.

So don't worry, Seymour.

It'll all work out.

You'll see already.

In the end it's all right.

Eventually we went back to Japan

with Requiem for a Dream.

I asked him

what he thought of the shot.

He said he was very proud.

So it was great. It was a lot of fun

to have that connection with him.

So at a certain point, we tried to get

the rights to do a version of it

in live action.

It was very complicated to do it,

because no one understood

what a pop star was,

understood this kind of character.

There was no real character.

Britney Spears hadn't really

happened in America yet.

So we didn't really have

that type of character

for people, so it was hard

for them to understand.

I think now would be a good time.

People understand that character.

We're 10-15 years behind

that cultural phenomenon in Japan.

Perfect Blue explores Kon's idea

that the universe,

and its representations, are but one.

Dream worlds, virtual worlds and reality

merge and interact.

It was inevitable that Satoshi Kon

would soon explore cinema itself.

I was truly blown away

when I discovered Perfect Blue.

So I contacted the producer Maruyama

and told him he absolutely

had to introduce me to Kon.

Perfect Blue didn't really receive

the recognition of the industry.

It was pretty humiliating.

We had to take another chance.

Usually when your film tanks,

you don't make another one.

But we like a challenge, so we said,

"Let's give the audience

"something

that'll really impress them!"

I think this film falls more

into the literary category.

The main character

is a great actress who has retired.

An old woman.

I feared

that wouldn't attract the crowds,

and I said as much

to the director.

Nice to meet you.

I'm Chiyoko Fujiwara.

This is a big day.

What an honor to meet you!

He said there'd be young girls too,

and he'd draw Chiyoko young.

He told me not to worry.

And he assured me

he'd mix fiction and reality

and use lots of visual tricks.

Can I say something?

No.

My mother...

thinks acting is a dubious profession.

Did she say dubious?

Madam!

The film is set in Manchuria.

It will raise troop morale

and encourage the people of our nation!

I'm sure Chiyoko

wants to serve her country!

Millennium Actress

is a fascinating film

in the way it uses the history

of Japanese cinema.

We follow

the great actress Chiyoko,

said to have been

inspired by Setsuko Hara.

Both actresses started out

in propaganda films,

as we see Chiyoko do

in Millennium Actress.

Setsuko Hara was a great actress.

Even though she's not from my generation,

she was a superstar.

But she left cinema

and retired in Kamakura.

We knew her story

and thought it was wonderful.

Her life was fascinating.

This gave Kon a chance to explore

his relationship with cinema

and create a universe,

at once complex and obvious,

in which

we constantly vacillate between

the reality of life

and the reality of films.

When Mr. Kon and I

discussed cinema,

Slaughterhouse 5 was the first

reference we had in common.

A whole swathe of artists in Japan

experienced that film

like an electroshock.

It wasn't just

that the chronology was mixed up.

It was defined

by the movements of the heart.

The film maintains a narrative thread,

even though the scenes are out of order.

How much can the audience understand?

The film served as an experiment

in answering that question.

The sequence of the scenes

is out of order,

but the film remains clear.

For us,

and all other members of the audience.

That is the film's major strength.

From an aesthetic point of view,

I wanted to play

with the same types of effects.

I told the whole crew

of my intentions.

On Perfect Blue,

the influence was purely technical.

But for Millennium Actress,

I took on the themes.

Millennium Actress shows

that inside a human being,

memories, the present,

the past and the future co-exist.

I think the themes of Slaughterhouse 5

influenced me precisely

in that direction.

It's the key to what matters most.

What matters most?

Give me until tomorrow. Promise?

Millennium Actress is built

around a key

that was given to the heroine.

She keeps the key

throughout the film,

trying to find the person

who had passed it along.

The key becomes a symbol

of the intertwining storylines.

A symbol of how difficult it is

to find a key

that will solve all the mysteries

the character is facing.

Millennium Actress seems to be

the story of Japanese cinema.

It shows all kinds of Japanese movies.

From domestic dramas to Godzilla movies.

It also seems to encompass

the whole of modern Japanese history,

starting about a thousand years ago

and moving up to World War II and beyond.

To evoke the various periods,

we needed a wide variety of material.

We had to find accessories to inspire

our drawings, scout locations...

I did a lot of research.

We looked to Ozu for the ending,

when Chiyoko is a bit older.

There's a scene with her mother.

Ozu's work was a major reference for us.

I'll find him!

You don't even know if he's alive!

He's alive! I know he is!

He was very much into

getting into people's minds and

and into the internal monologues.

And I guess that's something

very common for live action,

but it's definitely unique for animation

to treat your characters

with such psychological depth.

If anyone is a dubbing legend,

it's Shōzō Iizuka.

He has played

hundreds of animated characters,

over a career

which began in the late 1960s.

Here and there in the film,

you sense the smells,

images and all the rest

in a very realistic way.

Up to that point,

in the world of animation,

we had many people who wrote with talent,

but they preferred

style over substance.

From Millennium Actress on,

people wanted to live up that film.

People worked harder

to write better animated films.

That tells you how good that film is.

In my opinion.

The first time we met,

I didn't know

if he was Japanese or not.

He had a really unique aura.

I thought he might be Chinese.

So I was pretty nervous when we met.

Then, talking to him,

he turned out to be very nice.

You could tell he was sure of himself

and knew what he wanted.

Usually, experience teaches us

what we're capable of.

But Mr. Kon

never asked himself such questions.

He felt he could do anything.

And in the moment,

that made me feel enormous pressure.

The film won the top prize

at the Japan Media Arts Festival.

But it was the year of Spirited Away,

so, exceptionally,

they gave the prize

to both films.

When it came

to the final line of the film,

he says it reflects his own way

of pursuing things in his own life.

He also says that the relationship

between the heroine

and the man she's seeking

was like the relationship

between a director

and the ideal movie

he had in his head.

As it turns out,

chasing after him

is what I like best.

He was...

abandoned.

If you want to start watching

Satoshi Kon's films,

anybody's recommendation would be

to start with Tokyo Godfathers.

Because it's fun, it's light,

but it's very beautiful.

It's a Christmas gift sent from the sky!

It's our baby!

What?

Each new Satoshi Kon film

got all the filmmakers talking.

I've seen them all.

From one film to the next,

the tone can change radically.

Take Perfect Blue

and Millennium Actress.

They explore similar themes,

but they're very different.

And Tokyo Godfathers

takes us to another place entirely.

The way he reinvents himself each time

through such different genres

shows us that cinema,

holds infinite possibilities.

Even his quick pencil sketches

looked like photographs.

Add to that

his vast knowledge

of the art of drawing,

and his work is very rich.

Sometimes he felt the work itself

would overtake him.

And it was important for him to question

his aesthetic tastes.

After Millennium Actress,

I thought we could do a simple story.

I thought we could remove

all those layers,

and it would still hold up.

So I proposed something

a bit lighter and more entertaining.

The film really delves into

Japanese society

in a way rarely seen,

especially in animation.

He chose to explore marginal characters.

A runaway girl, homeless people...

This was significant.

It allowed Kon, in his way,

to stand up

for a Japan that was hurting.

To give voice to those left behind

by the economic miracle.

It's quite raw, quite violent.

But zaniness is injected throughout.

Hilarious scenes, lighter stuff.

And this very simple situation –

a baby landing providentially

in the arms of 3 homeless men –

launches us on a voyage through Tokyo,

the sordid underbelly of Tokyo.

Not the Tokyo tourists see.

I was really into it.

I love the freedom of tone.

It really works.

He's a bad gambler, a coward,

his feet stink, he drinks too much!

He claims his wife and daughter are dead

to get pity!

He claims you have

an incurable disease!

I feel sorry for you,

having him for a father!

This is where I discovered

Shinji Otsuka, the animator.

He animated the sequences in the hospital,

of the drag queen going crazy.

Her acting is so extreme.

He showed me the folder,

because it was in the studio.

The folder was about that thick,

just for one scene.

And it was submitted to Kon.

In Japan, the animators animate,

and then the directors

apply the corrections on top.

But because there was so much paper,

he just sat back, going,

"I can't correct this,

there's too many drawings."

But he watched the animation

and he loved it so much.

He said

Tokyo Godfathers

was the most fun he had

in any film that he directed.

All the animators started going

really wacky and mad and expressive.

He said every time the animators

got crazier and crazier,

he had to instruct Mr. Ike,

the art director,

"More realistic! More realistic!"

Because the animation

was becoming so surreal,

he needed something

to keep the world in reality.

I got a lot of praise

for the depiction of Tokyo

in Tokyo Godfathers.

I was interested in exploring

parts of Tokyo not usually seen,

like the alleyways and paths I would take

on my way to work.

I'd always wanted to show

Tokyo as I knew it.

The director shared my desire.

When he told me

he'd be using that side of Tokyo

in his next film,

I knew the job was for me.

We tried to be extremely faithful.

We wanted Tokyo to become

a character in itself.

The film was influenced by a western,

a Hollywood film called 3 Godfathers.

Because of the framework,

which is 3 adults who find this baby.

It's something that's been done

in other movies, obviously.

There was a French comedy,

which was then remade

as a Hollywood film,

Three Men and a Baby.

It's a familiar template,

but Kon turns it his particular way.

We had such fun here, didn't we?

♪ In this old bar ♪

♪ I've drained so many glasses ♪

♪ My memories too ♪

♪ Are draining away ♪

He used to really make us laugh

in the evenings,

dressing up as a woman.

He loved to do that.

Surprise his friends,

crack everyone up.

To him, in all things,

frontwards and backwards co-exist.

The front alone didn't interest him,

nor did the back alone.

Every single film,

he financially struggled,

to make sure that the animators

were paid quite well.

People say he's really established

as a director, he's very respected.

At the end of the day, the reality and

the politics of the film industry

is that if he's not making big bucks

like Ghibli is,

he really isn't 100% respected

by the industry itself.

Between the moment

we finished Millennium Actress

and its theater release,

a year passed.

So we threw ourselves

into producing Tokyo Godfathers.

Millennium Actress

was praised by the critics.

It was considered a masterpiece.

But for a director

who still hadn't had

a hit at the box office,

it was very difficult

to finance the next film.

For that reason,

Kon told me

I'd brought shame to the profession.

In the middle of the project,

I got booted off the project.

When we started working together,

he wasn't yet known.

But he did consider himself

to be a genius.

I think that's how he saw himself.

Seraphim was a project for a manga series.

As he did for Otomo,

each panel was fully-developed.

It was admirable.

I remember thinking

that there weren't many mangakas

able to express in their drawing

what I wanted to convey.

Especially in this case.

There were so many important details.

I would've loved to have him

drawing for me to the end.

But from the start,

my desire to collaborate with him

was an unrealistic idea.

He was someone who confined himself

to his own works.

Working on a manga that I'd written

no doubt hurt his pride.

Every time we got together,

we ended up getting in a fight.

We only ended up with one volume.

We reached a dead-end.

The level of conflict

we experienced as collaborators

was totally new to me.

We had no choice but to abandon the project.

Paranoia Agent, right?

When I saw it, I thought, "Wow!"

Personally,

I really like things like that.

You don't know

what's going to happen,

and you need

that kind of suspense in a series.

He should have done series

instead of cinema.

Satoshi Kon's answer to Twin Peaks,

Paranoia Agent spends 13 episodes

pursuing a mysterious rollerblading

aggressor terrorizing Tokyo,

in a narrative and graphic maelstrom

unprecedented in animated series.

Welcome to M&F. No, sorry.

We couldn't reach her.

That's all I know.

I'm going to check the hospital.

The victim of this savage aggression

is the creator

of the famous Maromi, Tsukiko Sagi...

For Satoshi Kon,

it was a very experimental piece

where he was playing around.

Every episode, he was playing around

a little bit with different styles.

It was kind of a study period for him.

He would assign

a handful of directors

to direct the different episodes.

Satoshi Kon wanted

each episode to have its own identity.

Character designer Masashi Ando

created many characters for Ghibli

before leaving the studio

after Spirited Away.

At a certain point, I wanted to take

a different direction.

And that's when Satoshi Kon came to me.

I wanted to be part of his universe.

It was so exciting.

And it could enrich me in so many ways.

I think if someone other than

Mr. Kon had been directing,

such drawings never would have

seen the light of day.

In ordinary animation productions,

we were content to draw

cute girls, handsome boys...

But when Mr. Kon

saw things like that,

he would wax ironic.

He'd point out

the characters' imperfections,

and tell us that was part of their charm,

and the charm

of humanity in general.

Working with him as a character designer

was a great opportunity for me.

Throughout the series,

we see the figure

of the boy with the bat.

This character embodies

the potentially

horrifying, intrusive idea

of dreams seeping into reality.

We see here the beginnings

of the work

he further develops on Paprika.

The porosity that can exist between

nightmares, dreams and reality.

Paranoia Agent is built around

the idea of alienation

and the inner transformation

individuals undergo

when they construct a micro-fiction.

The boy with the bat embodies this.

He represents a collective fiction

that sparks paranoia in society.

Satoshi Kon's vision may be

extremely negative.

But we see all the elements

pushing an individual over the edge.

You rang?

What makes the series

both optimistic and unsettling at the end,

is that everything is resolved,

but starts again.

To get by in life,

we all need an escape.

Through fantasies, dreams,

or even paranoia.

Otherwise, life is too hard.

The way an individual sees the world

is altered by his fantasies or paranoia.

So I don't think paranoia

is necessarily unhealthy.

The series gets us thinking

about our mobile phones.

In hindsight,

we see that the series develops

a fairly elaborate, precursory theory

about all these communication devices

that isolate people

and shut them down

more than they facilitate communication.

It makes lots of satirical points

about the pressures of society,

the pressures of the workplace,

about masculinity.

There's one episode,

I think episode 3, Double Lips,

that seems like a kind

of funny, campy remake

of Perfect Blue,

with another woman

with a frightening split personality.

Shut up and follow me.

You're hurting me, stop!

You make me sick.

Paprika is kind of the

positive flip side to Paranoia Agent.

In much the same way as

Millennium Actress

was the positive flip side

to Perfect Blue.

One of the most obvious is the figure

of the policeman who drives the plot.

Both Paprika and Paranoia Agent

have women

who have double personalities,

which again arguably goes back to

Perfect Blue.

In Paranoia Agent,

the two split personalities

are fighting each other.

Whereas in Paprika,

they have some arguments,

but they support and empower each other.

It's the greatest show time!

I think Paprika's charm lies

in the unprecedented visual impact it had.

It was brand new.

I think Paprika is a beautiful film.

There's something joyful about it.

I would say it's the most fun

of Satoshi Kon's movies.

For his final feature – and biggest hit –,

Satoshi Kon

tells the story of scientists

who invent a machine to visit dreams,

that gets stolen.

Professor Chiba sends her

dream-word double, Paprika,

to visit suspects' subconscious.

The film is an adaptation

of a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui.

The legendary author's work

has often been brought to the screen.

But Paprika

was considered unadaptable.

Tsutsui is an author of science fiction.

Beyond that,

he's a distinguished literary figure.

He went as far as

writing about language itself.

It got to a point where it became

difficult to adapt his work.

It had such a wide scope.

It was so unique, so bountiful.

He is utterly original

and very avant-garde.

All that makes him a bit of a star

in the eyes of people of my generation.

Among Satoshi Kon's influences,

Yasutaka Tsutsui is huge.

Tsutsui's work

was a very important element

in his personal development.

I understood that very well.

So when we worked on Paprika together,

I let him do what he wanted,

eyes closed.

I had seen many works

by Satoshi Kon,

and I liked everything I saw.

Millennium Actress

was the one I liked the most.

It explores one of the

recurring themes in my novels,

the confrontation

between reality and fiction.

This theme runs through

all of Satoshi Kon's work.

Only Kon could adapt Paprika.

So I asked him to do it.

I'd read the novel ten years prior

and really loved it.

In Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress,

I'd subconsciously tried

to recreate the world of Paprika.

I only kept the bare bones

of the story in my film.

The rest was modified.

The story of Paprika is so gigantic,

it was impossible

to boil it down to 90 minutes.

So, either you do

a synopsis of the work –

which is not interesting

in comparison to the novel –

or you decide to do

something completely different.

Paprika really affected me profoundly,

because we were adapting

at the same time, for Madhouse,

a novel by Tsutsui.

What angle would Kon take

in his Tsutsui adaptation?

I wondered that, as I was directing

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

And when I saw it,

I felt that it was so limpid.

Expressing Tsutsui's work in that way

was so impressive.

In a film like this,

we go from the world of dreams

to reality, and vice versa.

You mustn't let the audience know exactly

where the frontiers lie

between these two dimensions.

We mustn't know where dreams begin

and reality ends, and vice versa.

No other director was capable

of pulling that off.

Kon was the one and only.

I just remember saying,

"I thought Paprika

was really really nice.

"I like the fact that it was quite dark,

in comparison to the trailer."

He said, "I didn't intend it to be dark.

You think it was dark?"

I was like, "Very!"

He was saying that was meant to be my big

commercial prostitute film debut.

And he was like,

"Paprika is my Sailor Moon project.

"She's the magical girl

who can transform into anything."

I was like, "I don't think

people saw it that way."

Satoshi Kon really became

the blinking light I was aiming for

with Spider-Verse.

It blew me away.

The level of subtlety,

the textures,

the risks that he was taking

in almost every aspect

of his film making.

It was something that I and

the crew of Spider-Verse could watch and say

we want to make something that

can tiptoe up to the realm of this.

Paprika just created its own feel.

It was transporting.

It was unnerving.

It wasn't just a movie

about bending reality,

it was a movie that captured

what it feels like to have reality bended.

From that, I really learned

one of the main lessons

that I thought a lot about

during the making of Into the Spider-Verse,

which is that animation

doesn't have to look real,

it just has to feel real.

It just has to feel

like some aspect of reality.

I don't know that I fully understood that

until I watched Paprika.

And again, it gave me

something to aim for.

Maybe this is really reductive,

but I often go back to Kubrick.

I think they're two

completely separate filmmakers,

but they both

transcend medium and genre.

And they both manage to create images

and a story

that make you feel

multiple things at once.

He is the illusionist of anime.

He is a director who starts off

by making you wonder

what is real

and what is not real,

and by the end he may well think

that it doesn't really matter.

It's show time!

That parade scene

is the high point of the film.

The most amazing moment.

Both in terms of animation and drawing.

♪ Plant trees

that grow dreams and money. ♪

The film Paprika

is a culmination.

It encapsulates all his major themes.

The film explores metamorphosis,

and the plasmaticity of animation.

The art form's capacity

to present changing forms

that can move

from one realm to another.

Kon thus illustrates here

the very origins of animation.

It becomes

the film's backbone,

and breathes new life into the very idea.

♪ God and Buddha exchange religions. ♪

♪ They entertain me

in this floating world. ♪

♪ They entertain me

in this floating world. ♪

Am I... still dreaming?

The parade

is like an image from another world.

It's like he was channeling

truly another world.

Again, I can't think of many films

that have that kind of power.

As we were doing the dubbing, we actors

got the impression that the director

was a very gentle man.

Very polite and respectful.

A real gentleman.

He seemed very serene.

Though his films

might lead you to believe

that he was half-crazy,

he was absolutely charming,

and very calm.

But although he radiated gentleness,

he was impenetrable.

Someone a bit crazy who does crazy things

is easy to understand and approach.

But the fact that he was so calm,

yet created such a delirious world,

made us wonder.

The more I saw him,

the more mysterious he seemed.

People who embody evil itself

had no place in Kon's universe.

He always had excuses for them,

justifications.

That's a testament

to his kindness.

Or to the generosity

of people from Hokkaido.

That was the feeling I got from his work.

He was very soft-spoken,

and very humble.

But I could tell

he was very confident in his ideas.

He was definitely a filmmaker.

That was inspiring to find out

that he was

conceiving it, drawing it, writing it.

So many of all the different worlds

were basically coming out

of his imagination and the hard work.

I remember

kind of feeling empathy

for how much work he had to do.

There was gonna be a lot of pain and

a lot of work to get his film done.

A year before he died,

we ran into each other at a party.

He smiled at me.

"Hey, Taro, we should go for a drink soon!"

That surprised me,

but also made me happy.

Then he died.

Several years later,

there was a screening in Sapporo.

I saw the film Tokyo Godfathers again.

I discovered things I hadn't picked up on

at the time.

I realized he hadn't been

ignoring me over financial problems.

It was because I hadn't understood

the very essence of his film.

Rediscovering Tokyo Godfathers

was an intense experience for me.

I had really underestimated its power

when it came out.

That was a shock to me.

It will be etched into my heart

for all time.

ON AUGUST 24, 2010, SATOSHI KON

DIED OF CANCER AT THE AGE OF 46.

THE NEXT DAY, HIS BLOG FEATURED

A GOODBYE LETTER ENTITLED SAYONARA.

MY GREATEST REGRET IS THE FILM

DREAMING MACHINE.

I'M WORRIED,

NOT ONLY ABOUT THE FILM ITSELF,

BUT ABOUT THE CREW I WORKED WITH.

I'm already working on my next film.

It's aimed at adults, as well as children.

Paprika marked an end to my usual themes,

the blurring of reality and fiction.

He was really clear that this was

a family film he was trying to make.

On Earth there are no humans left,

or creatures in general left.

And what's left

are machines,

that were created by people

to do the labor.

Now that people

have disappeared from Earth,

these robots are still doing their jobs

that they're programmed to do.

Robin, Ririko and King

are the main three characters.

And they become friends.

The situation is

that electricity is running out.

And obviously without electricity

they cannot live.

The tsunami is happening,

and places that they can survive

are starting to become limited.

They know of a place called

"The Land of Electricity"

where there's

an unlimited supply of electricity.

So their goal is to get there.

The whole story is seen

through the eyes of Robin, a child,

so it's easier to understand.

Ririko arrives in the Garden of Eden,

where Robin is living alone.

So he uses a lot of symbolism.

Ririko is the representation of Eve,

of Adam and Eve.

She gives Robin,

the main character, his brain,

because he's missing his head.

Ririko is a robot type

of the babysitter, or the nanny.

So she's built and programmed

to take care of children.

That's why she looks

the way she looks.

She looks a bit like a Barbie

or a cuddly toy.

The whole design of the project

had to be done by Kon.

It's pure science fiction.

I really would've loved

to see the result.

See what he'd have done with it.

When you read the script

of Dreaming Machine,

there's quite scary stuff in it,

and there's a lot of dark points in it,

and there's a complexity

in the narrative as well.

When Satoshi Kon

is working on one project,

it's never about that film.

He's actually thinking about

the next film within that film.

So, in Paprika,

actually some parts you see

are similar to Dreaming Machine.

There's a graffiti on the wall,

of the main 3 characters.

There's actually a lot of hints

about what's coming next.

I got a call from Mr. Kon.

I was surprised.

He felt I wasn't working

hard enough on Paprika.

"Mr. Mima,

I'm not seeing the hard work."

He was preparing his next film

and wondering

whether to work with me.

He was very direct.

I figured I should be

as direct as he was.

So I told him I was quitting.

I wouldn't work with him anymore.

Mr. Kon demanded skills and expertise

that were far beyond my capacities.

For the first time,

I waved a white flag,

and we got into a fight.

I told him I'd be the first

to go see his film,

but that I didn't want

to be a part of the crew.

I turned down his offer

to work on Dreaming Machine.

Mr. Kon died soon after that,

and I was full of regret.

That's the reason

I agreed to be in this documentary.

To say that I'm here today,

thanks to Mr. Kon.

His big goal for Dreaming Machine

was that he wanted to aid

training of young animators.

So he wanted to give opportunities

and he wanted to mentor these people.

His loss isn't just

the loss of a great director,

a really unique creative.

The anime industry lost somebody

who's actually a representative

and a really strong force of trying

to improve the industry as a whole.

So I think that was the

major part of his loss as well.

THANK YOU SINCERELY

FOR ALL THESE BEAUTIFUL MEMORIES.

I LOVED THE WORLD I LIVED IN.

JUST THINKING ABOUT IT

MAKES ME HAPPY.

I'm convinced that Kon's films

will be major references

for all future directors

of animated films.

Even subconsciously,

future artists will be

under the influence of Satoshi Kon.

The way people see animated cinema

has evolved since he died,

in Japan and throughout the world.

I think he landed too soon

in this industry.

But thanks to that,

he's an inspiration to many others.

I would say this is one of the

great filmmakers of the last 30 years.

Someone who's contributed more

to the well of innovation and inspiration

than almost any filmmaker

I can think of in the last 30 years.

You're gonna have

a very, very unique experience.

Very, very unexpected.

And you'll have a full human meal

and a full human journey

in any of his films.

As much for his personality

as for his films,

he sought perfection at any price.

How can I put this...?

Not only with a perfect drawing,

but with perfect direction.

He couldn't forgive

the slightest error or failure.

Through his films,

he was trying to resolve

things he didn't understand,

and share that with others.

Few people are capable

of transposing such deep questions

to cinema

with such virtuosity

and illustrative talent.

If someone tried to measure up,

they would be

nowhere near as good as him.

Summing someone up in a word is difficult.

Especially Satoshi Kon.

I can't do it.

He had two sides to him.

He could be a nasty guy.

A really nasty guy, okay?

But I loved him.

I can say that,

because I love him.

He had more than one face.

Sometimes you had to be wary of him.

But he was also endearing.

You couldn't help but get attached.

He will always be in our hearts.