Millennium Auteur

Satoshi Kon died on a Tuesday and came back virally when Makiko Itoh translated a posthumous blog post from the Japanese anime filmmaker; retweets inevitably followed. The stream-of-consciousness missive ran through his fears and acceptance of the situation to the brutal send-off Itoh clarified: "So, he is essentially saying to the reader, 'I have to go now, I'm leaving this world before you.'"

It's always heartbreaking when we lose a great artist, but the 46-year-old's online farewell was in line with his career: beating back death through the Internet's celebration of his work (if you need documented proof of this acclaim, look no further than The Daily Notebook's round-up). Simply put, Satoshi Kon's themes and ideas teach us how to cope with his loss.

As a director, Kon kept a keen eye on the changing ways we as an audience consume our media(s) of choice. Perfect Blue's original production fell victim to the massive 1995 Kobe earthquake, shifting from its projected life as a direct-to-video series to a one-off animated project given to an unknown talent and production house responsible for other cult-y films like Demon City Shinjuku and Lensman. Perfect Blue follows Mima, a pop star wishing to become an actress and leave her group behind, which ultimately leads to stalkers, a fake "online diary" that may or may not be written by her, and confusion about what's real and what's part of the entertainment world. (More meta-context: Mima works on a straight-to-video film whose role requires her character be raped, which then skews her own life.)

Kon emerged as an auteur of global importance just as anime was doing the same. 2001's Millennium Actress became his ode to film and twisting animation's boundaries, using post-war Japan's studio system boom to frame a love story. Kon's 2006 transhumanist opus Paprika presented us with a culmination of the motifs he initially poked at in the 2003 series Paranoia Agent, set in an urban wasteland populated by overtly "cute," seemingly saccharine characters with corrupt and even outright apocalyptic motives.

The titular character in Paprika is an in-dream avatar of Dr. Chiba, who works on a device that allows her into the minds of her patients. Of course, the device is illegal and untested, so when three prototypes are stolen and inevitably begin to bleed into the real world, a terrifying parade becomes the central invading dream throughout the film. During a press junket with Kon, I gleaned this:

"For us, the parade is a symbol of a nightmare. Usually when nightmares are portrayed in a film and anime, it's very dark. For Paprika, we wanted it to be disgustingly decadent and grossly colorful—and that was our idea." Among the dolls and frogs playing brass instruments, Kon noted the parade is "composed of a lot of things that people have thrown away as society progresses."

The procession grows throughout the film, invading real life and forcefully turning people into their own dream-selves. Think of it like taking the minority opinion that Inception didn't do enough with dream imagery and force-fed it a few sheets of LSD to a J-Pop soundtrack. Likewise, the film's Detective Konakawa struggles through his own dreamscape, shaded in film noir and movie theaters.

Yet at Paprika's climax, it is these same discarded figures—a 1950s wind-up toy robot, for instance—that save the world from a toxic merging of reality and dreams. When Paprika/Dr. Chiba is imported into the detective's subconscious and Konakawa has to transform himself into Akira Kurosawa in order to "keep the scene" going, he realizes to stop his dream he must "finish his film." Kon relied on what the Internet promised us: a globally accessible source that glues international references together. Even if you don't know who Son Wukong is, Paprika makes you subliminally aware, and Paprika uses the trait to empower herself.

In Kon's view, the audience and his characters are growing more connected by a collective unconscious. A reference like Wukong may only seem iconic to the Japanese as "the hero," but film buffs around the world understand Kurosawa being name-dropped as "the director." Over the years since its release, we grow and learn—quite easily in the Wiki-age—about these cultural allusions, which eliminates some physical boundaries. Kon explored this further in Paranoia Agent, which should be seen as a companion to Paprika. Hhere, the fear and acceptance of both technology and media is replaced by the Internet's fleeting collectables: memes. The series illustrates a Tokyo obsessed with images and psychosis induced by stories, and features a character who fittingly cameos later in Paprika.

Kon's career felt like a happy combination of the work Hayao Miyazaki and Mamoru Oshii crafted as Japanese animation grew into its global perch. He was neither as environmentalist or family-friendly as Miyazaki, nor as blatantly art-house in his execution like Oshii. Instead, Kon took our emerging future head-on and told us stories where the threat of Judgment Day constantly bubbled up in our cities, but all will be okay because no one would let the world self-destruct. Like the haunting opening of Paranoia Agent recommends, why not be amused by the marvelous mushroom-shaped cloud in the sky?

We've lost Satoshi Kon to the same worldly inevitability we all face. At the same time, the posthumous online distribution of his final words—a literal representation of the prescient ideas in his work—promotes the idea that our new global identity transcends pointless boundaries like geography and mortality thanks to the ubiquitous services that allow us to repost or retweet thoughts. Kon left us too early, but we're still hard at work until we rejoin him.

Posted by ahillis at September 6, 2010 11:48 PM