Perfect Blue (1997)
Dir. Satoshi Kon
PB explores the true cost of success for twenty-one-year-old Mima Kirigoe as she makes the difficult transition from beloved Japanese idol status to impressionable TV drama actress.
Eager to please, when the fiction in Mima's head overlaps with the fiction on the film set, shit gets real, with the kind of meaningful editing that Alfred Hitchcock might applaud, if he was alive.
Perfect Blue is director Satoshi Kon's début full-length movie, but it flows like it was his fourth or fifth. It's both a careful study of splintering, crumbling reality and a skilful exercise in artifice.
The result is a genre classic that's chilling, creepy, and can be uncomfortable viewing at times, but is highly recommended to fans of anime with bite.
NOTE: it's loosely based on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi titled Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis (2018). Kon has been quoted as saying that he didn't actually read the novel himself, which, ordinarily, is an embarrassing oversight that I'd be critical of, but on this occasion it's probably a good thing because Takeuchi's novel is an underdeveloped, amateurish text that relies on shock value. The movie craps all over it.
In short, the PB anime is a disturbing and sophisticated exploration of fame and identity, but it seems that the credit for that goes almost completely to Kon and its screenwriter, Sadayuki Murai, with very little of what makes it work coming from the original novel itself.
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