The Man in the Mirror: Satoshi Kon
What do an idol singer stalked by a crazed fan, an actress on a lifelong quest, a blocked artist, three homeless people, and a Magical Girl in a dream world have in common? Their creator: Satoshi Kon.
Near the end of his life, Osamu Tezuka spoke of the new generation of manga artists and animators, men and women who had the talent that in another era would have taken them into other media: painting and sculpture, novels and cinema. They brought a new level of sophistication to those media regarded in the West as the most childish and the least likely to reach the realm of art.
Among the directors who have already assembled a body of work, one of the animators of this new generation has gathered worldwide praise for only half a dozen titles. Director Satoshi Kon rose up through the ranks and not only moved from strength to strength, but has done so with a consistent artistic vision. Most of his works bounce perception against reality, bounce the way people are against the way people seem to be, and keep bouncing until something explodes. He then turns the explosion into art.
In the Beginning
Kon was born in 1963 on the northern island of Hokkaido; it may not be a coincidence that Hokkaido was a featured locale in Kon’s 2002 masterpiece Millennium Actress. But there were other, earlier stops along the way.
He studied painting at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, founded in 1929 as the Imperial Art School. The school started out teaching fine arts and industrial design; later it added animation among what it called “imaging arts.” While in college Kon created a manga called Toriko; at a reception where Kon received a “Superior Newcomer” award, he met manga artist and anime director Katsuhiro Otomo. In 1991 Otomo directed his first project after the history-making feature Akira: the live action film World Apartment Horror. Kon worked on the manga that inspired the film. This led to two other Otomo projects for Kon: background designer for 1991’s Roujin Z, and screenwriter and mecha designer for the “Magnetic Rose” segment of the 1995 anthology film Memories. Even as early as these Otomo-related anime, the die seemed to be cast that would define Kon’s artistic vision.
Roujin Z is a political comedy about a mechanized hospital bed programmed to take care of an elderly patient; it’s also covertly intended to test weapon circuitry. However, the patient’s friends decide to re-program the bed with the personality of the patient’s late wife. The essential theme of this anime is that things, and elderly people, are seldom as harmless as they seem. On the other hand, “Magnetic Rose” went full-tilt into Kon’s trademark conflict of appearances and reality: a space ship salvage crew finds the orbiting home of a retired and reclusive operatic diva. The diva is now dead, but the ship computer continues to simulate her whims, preferences, dreams, and performances.
Singing the Blue
1997 saw the release of Kon’s first feature as director and co-writer with Sadayuki Murai: Perfect Blue. Influences in this film, based on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi and animated (like all of Kon’s projects) by the studio Madhouse, were less Walt Disney and even less Katsuhiro Otomo, and more the thrillers of Brian De Palma. The suspense ratchets up and up to nearly unbearable levels.
Perfect Blue focuses on that quintessential Japanese invention: the modern idol singer (see part 1, chapter 13). It starts with the last performance of the pop trio CHAM. Its lead singer, Mima Kirigoe, has decided to get out of singing and pursue an acting career. However, the switch is hardly easy. She’s cast in a made-for-video series called Double Bind about a woman suffering through a career change similar to Mima’s. In one sequence, where her character in the video series plays a stripper who gets gang-raped in the club where she works, the actors get carried away to the point where Mima begins confusing fantasy and reality.
It doesn’t stop there. Someone is dissatisfied with Mima’s career change and expresses their displeasure first in postings to an unauthorized fan website, “Mima’s Room”; later, corpses start piling up.
Perfect Blue used Kon’s past association with the creator of Akira to sell the film overseas; it was shown in several foreign film festivals where audiences looked beyond the mention of Otomo and realized that this was a vision worth watching.
A Thousand Years at the Movies
Kon’s second film still draws on blurring the line between reality and perception; however, it strikes a completely different tone as a saga of love, its illusions, its compromises, and its intense passions. Millennium Actress also deals with love of movies; it’s as perfect a love poem to the movies as has ever been made.
Written by Kon and Murai, Millennium Actress starts (as it ends) with scenes on the moon reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the image starts shaking, we realize that we’re watching a movie within a movie; director Genya Tachibana is screening clips from an assortment of productions by Ginei Studios, which is tearing down its “obsolete” studios after seventy years.1 Many of their movies starred actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who made her first movie at age fourteen. After thirty years at the studio, Chiyoko went into a secluded retirement; Genya is using the studio’s demise as an excuse to hunt her down for a documentary interview. It’s no coincidence that Genya’s had a lengthy crush on Chiyoko.
When Chiyoko appears, it’s as a skinny, elderly woman who still has star quality: regal without being arrogant, attractive without being vain. We find out that the earthquake that morning (the reason for the shaking image) may have been an omen, since she was born September 1, 1923 during a major Japanese disaster: the Kanto earthquake that leveled two-fifths of the buildings in Tokyo and almost all of neighboring Yokohama. The quake killed Chiyoko’s father, who made good money as owner of a confectionery. However, it was only the first of several quakes that would highlight her life, some of which would be natural and some created by movie magic. (The several small quakes that hit the day of the interview were symmetrical, since it would also be Chiyoko’s last day on earth.) When Chiyoko was fourteen, she was “discovered” by the head of Ginei Studios, who was impressed with Chiyoko’s looks. He wanted to use her in a maudlin love story that was also to be a propaganda piece about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; the studio head tried to sell Chiyoko’s mother on the film by calling it part of her patriotic duty.
Chiyoko herself is caught between her mother and the studio when destiny decides the matter. Her path crosses that of a man: an artist, wounded and pursued by the police because of his leftist politics.2 Chiyoko helps him hide from the authorities in her family’s storage building; after a day or two, he takes off to meet up with friends in occupied Manchuria. Before he goes, he leaves a portrait of Chiyoko painted on the storeroom wall and accidentally drops an old key to “the most important thing there is.” He also leaves an infatuated teenage girl. She’s so taken by the anonymous fugitive that she agrees to sign up with Ginei Studios since they will be filming in Manchuria.
The rest of the movie expands the geometry beyond the simple romantic triangle. Chiyoko is still infatuated by the painter but has no idea where he is; the son of Ginei’s main director sets about wooing and ultimately marrying Chiyoko, while Genya, starting at the bottom of the studio ladder, harbors a crush on Chiyoko but never speaks it. Then there’s Eiko, the actress who has to spend her career playing second fiddle to Chiyoko. All of these events, and many more, are illustrated by scenes from Chiyoko’s most famous movies, with story lines as far back as the Heian era, up to modern times, and every period in between (thus encompassing the millennium of the title). She grows as a person as well as an actress, from ingénue to romantic lead to “Japan’s Madonna.”
The roles are based on classic (and less-than-classic) Japanese movie genres, from historical costume dramas to Godzilla-style rubber-suited monsters. A recurring fortune-telling witch (who, it is later hinted, may even be Chiyoko herself) seems to have stepped out of Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Then again, when she tries during the seventies to get to Manchuria once again to look for her beloved artist, she hitches a ride with a trucker whose vehicle is tricked out with chrome, lights, murals, and other things that make it resemble a rolling Pachinko machine. This references a genre series of B movies in Japan, torakku yaro (truck guys), about fictional drunken, womanizing long-haul drivers and the very real dekotora (decorated truck) subculture.
In Millennium Actress, as in the later film Paprika, time is so fluid as to be almost meaningless; Chiyoko’s roles segue from medieval princess to a ninja, from a girl in a frilly Western gown to a lunar scientist in a space suit, often with no warning or logic at all. The viewer simply has to sit back, relax, and be amazed by Kon’s craft.
A Baby You Can’t Refuse
A complete shift in tone, although another homage to movies, came with Tokyo Godfathers. Kon and Murai wrote the screenplay as a variation on John Ford’s classic Western 3 Godfathers. While Ford’s film takes place in the Wild West, Kon’s title sets the film in modern Tokyo. While Millennium Actress takes place during one very eventful day, this film happens between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The overall plot is the same as Ford’s film: three misfits find a baby and have to take care of it.
Ford’s misfits were three men; Kon’s group is more diverse. Gin is a homeless middle-aged alcoholic, a one-time star athlete (or so he says) until he retreated from a scandal into alcoholism. Hana is also middle-aged and homeless, but he’s a drag queen whose lover died. Then there’s Miyuki, a runaway teenage girl who helps the other two and in doing so avoids confronting her own family problems.
The trio begins the movie on Christmas Eve at the Salvation Army, which offers food to the homeless. Hana goes back for seconds, joking about getting pregnant as a Christmas miracle and telling the server, “I’m eating for two.” The joke becomes real when they find a baby abandoned in a dumpster. They spend the movie, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, finding a home for the infant while inadvertently sorting out their own lives along the way.
Just as they help other people, despite being broke and homeless, they get some help themselves. The big aid comes at the climax, when Hana literally has to jump off the roof of a skyscraper to rescue the baby. It’s the night of New Year’s Eve and earlier we saw Hana and Miyuki praying at a Shinto shrine. Not only does Hana rescue the baby, but grabs onto a banner advertising a sale. When the banner comes loose, it looks very bad—until a strong gust of wind roars down the street and catches the banner, lowering Hana and the baby slowly to the ground. While this is happening, the camera looks down the street and finds the rising sun. This rescue, as the symbolism indicates, was brought about by no less than Amaterasu, the Shinto sun deity.
A serial assailant is terrorizing the Musashino neighborhood of Tokyo. This is the home of Musashino Art Institute, where Kon was a student. The only television anime created by Kon, Paranoia Agent (2004), chronicles Shonen Bat (Bat Boy or, in English, Li’l Slugger) and his random attacks, and a mousy little illustrator named Tsukiko Sagi.
Sagi works for a marketing company like Sanrio or San-X: Japanese corporations that create cartoon characters primarily for social communication. Japanese society is based, and has been for centuries, on on and giri, obligation and reciprocation respectively. When Valentine’s Day was first introduced to Japan in 1958, women were encouraged to give chocolate to their sweethearts. Unlike Christmas, when gifts are exchanged, Valentine’s Day created a one-way obligation. This was corrected in 1965 when Japan declared March 14 to be White Day (originally Marshmallow Day) so that men could finally return the favor and give something to the women. Examples of social communication in Japan are as well known as they are plentiful, the best known being the iconic doll Hello Kitty.
Sagi strikes similar gold at the beginning of Paranoia Agent when she invents a big-eyed droopy-eared pink dog named Maromi. This cartoon canine is ubiquitous throughout the series, a phenomenal success. This leads to the first of two terrifying circumstances for Sagi: what does she do for an encore? Her bosses keep pushing her to duplicate the success of Maromi, but the more she tries to make lightning strike twice, the worse her creative block. One night, as she walks home, she’s attacked by a grade school boy with gold in-line skates, a bent gold baseball bat, and a red baseball cap. The two police who investigate the beating think there’s something suspicious about Sagi’s story. Then there’s another attack. . . .
So begins the thirteen-week series, in which the attacks by Shonen Bat escalate, interweaving the various victims. In the end, after episodes that were stylistically unique every week, we learn what we’d suspected to be the truth: Shonen Bat, like Maromi, was invented by Sagi.
* * *
Having said all of that, something else struck me, which I at first thought was absurd, then obvious, then probably both:
In the anime-within-an-anime in episode ten, we see the creation of an animated film featuring Maromi giving advice to a Little League baseball player. The boy wears an M on his cap; that probably means the town where he lives begins with an M. The M perhaps also stands for Maromi.
However, since Maromi’s shadow in the series is Shonen Bat, and the boy in the anime-within-an-anime is literally a shonen batto (or “young man with a bat,” although a benign one instead of a serial assailant), I suspect that the cap acts on another level. The current generation of Japanese animators, after all, is an educated and savvy bunch. Kon certainly is, exhibit A being Millennium Actress, which evokes Japanese cinema from Throne of Blood to Godzilla, with stops along the way at Casablanca and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey framing the film; exhibit B is Kon’s remake of John Ford’s remake of 3 Godfathers. Other examples appear in the next film by Kon, Paprika. Perhaps the boy’s cap is a “tip of the hat” to Fritz Lang’s movie about another serial killer: M. It seems outrageous until you remember that Lang himself appears as a character in the first Fullmetal Alchemist feature film. Whether intentionally or not, equating the innocent-looking young batter with “the vampire of Dusseldorf” (the nickname of Lang’s murderous pedophile) is not a stretch, but a chilling indication of Kon’s craft.
Paprika
One of 2010’s big summer Hollywood releases was Inception. Directed and written by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), the effects-driven film was immediately hailed as (to quote one representative critic) “state-of-the-art noir” in which “a small band of intellectual adventurers . . . invade—and often share—the dreams of clients.”3
Perhaps along the way to creating this screenplay, Nolan caught Kon’s Paprika. Released in 2006, with a screenplay by Kon and Seishi Minikami and based on a science fiction novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui (whose work provided the basis for another wonderful anime feature, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), Paprika is about a small band of scientists who develop the DC Mini, a machine that can not only monitor people’s dreams, but also enter and alter them. Once an evildoer steals one of the prototypes, the unhinging of reality begins.
Coincidence? I’m just saying.
Like Millennium Actress and Paranoia Agent, Paprika draws on a host of Hollywood movies, from its circus opening (The Greatest Show On Earth) to Tarzan to Roman Holiday to X-Men (putting the Chairman of the research facility in a wheelchair was, frankly, overused even before Stephen Hawking began teaching at Cambridge in 1979). In the end, Paprika obeys no logic but its own as its dialogue and images become chaotically random.
The main characters are at once familiar movie types yet interestingly different. Police Detective Konakawa is trying to solve a seemingly simple murder, until the walls start melting like plastic in an oven. The detective is led to the scientists who have developed and are testing the DC Mini: Kosaku Tokita, whose large puppy-dog eyes are matched in scale by the rest of his body (the first the audience sees of him is when he’s stuck in an elevator), Atsuko Chiba, and Torataro Shima. Dr. Tokita invented the machine, and its principal tester is Dr. Chiba, a film type from ‘50s sci-fi: the cold, cerebral, bespectacled, emotionless woman. When she appears in the dream world, however, she becomes Paprika: a vivacious spirit whose hair color provides her name. She’s quick, active, nimble, compassionate: all the things Doctor Chiba cannot allow herself to be outside of her dreams. Their boss, Dr. Shima, is attacked by the stolen device, nearly killing himself while dreaming that he is king of a land of dolls (from Japanese Daruma dolls to the Statue of Liberty) and walking appliances. His dialogue descends to lines like, “The sun during midday will light up the dark night.”
Maybe this film inspired Christopher Nolan after all. I’m just saying.
In the original, the voice of Paprika and Dr. Chiba were provided by Megumi Hayashibara (see part 1, chapter 13). Having semi-retired from idol singer and voice actress to wife and mother, she has limited herself to a few key projects per year. She must have known this movie would provide the role (or roles) of a lifetime, and she makes the most of it; her acting is so nuanced that it complements the subtitles even for non-speakers, bringing out the best in the roles. On the other hand, a pair of virtual bartenders in the dream world is voiced by director Satoshi Kon and novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui. Think of it as an Alfred Hitchcock homage.
There can be differing opinions as to whether Paprika influenced Inception, but one scene is a clean and undeniable link: in the climactic dream sequence, when Paprika is trying to escape the chairman and his helper, she defies gravity by running across the wall instead of the floor. And this is an image that found its way into the dreamscape of Inception.
I’m just saying . . .
* * *
Unfortunately, reality doesn’t always work out. On August 23, 2010, word spread on the Internet that Satoshi Kon had died at the age of 47. He was at work on a new project, a movie titled Yume-Miru Kikai (The Dream Machine).
The last word on the subject came in a note from Kon himself:
May 18 of this year, an unforgettable day. My wife and I received the following prognosis from a cardiologist at the Musashino Red Cross Hospital: The pancreatic cancer is terminal and has metastasized to the bone. You have at most a half year left. When I conveyed my concerns for Yume-Miru Kikai to [Studio Madhouse founder] Mr. [Masao] Maruyama, he said, “It’s fine. Don’t worry, we’ll do whatever it takes.” I cried. I cried aloud. With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen. Well, I’ll be leaving now. Satoshi Kon
1. A scene of the random trashed props at the studio includes a cherub statue, like the ones that attacked the crew in “Magnetic Rose.”
2. Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law was one of the most significant prewar laws. It outlawed offenses against the “kokutai” (which can be translated as “national character”), which encompassed all forms of leftist politics. Until the 1945 surrender, over 70,000 Japanese were arrested under the law but never tried.
3. http://thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com/2010/07/nolans-brillaint-crackpot-of-movie.html