Satoshi Kon (Work in Detail)

Satoshi Kon was a film director, screenwriter, animator, and manga artist from Japan born in 1963. Essentially, the Japanese artist born in the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, was an anime director. The term “anime” is coined for Japanese animations that date back to even as far as the early 1900s. Early in his life Kon had a specifically strong interest in painting which later evolved to storytelling through illustration. Graduating from a graphic design course at Musashino Art University in 1982 only helped to improve these budding talents. Kon’s first works in 1984 were as a manga artist but by 1990 he had found his role as a scriptwriter and overall art director. While Satoshi Kon’s greatest works were still ahead of him, the work he had done as a manga artist certainly played an important role in his growth to the legendary director and story teller he later became. Very little compares to the various critically acclaimed works of Satoshi Kon, especially within his field of filmmaking.

In 1997, he made his film debut as a director with his first masterpiece, Perfect Blue, a story about a pop singer who quit her promising trio to become an actress. During her struggling quest for a successful acting career her sense of reality trembles, as she is stalked by an obsessive fan and is haunted by the memories of her past. During the presentation work of the now late Satoshi Kon, he straight away demonstrated how capable he is in making quality anime. Kon’s virtuoso directing capabilities within an animation only seems to add to his talent and create a great sense of mystery and suspense compared by critics to the legendary Alfred Hitchcock. Joined with the gigantic spending plans by Madhouse the outcome was more than extraordinary. Rather than heading down the route of minimum effort and offering fan pleasing qualities and idealism he went the other way and made an engaging and impressive piece of work that provides stunning Japanese social commentary. Quickly into his career he digs into the ominent and intricate side of the pop industry, which most anime are introducing to be celebrity foolishness. The film displays upsetting realities that occur in the entertainment industry, for example, demonstrating how a heavenly figure, is in the long run, prompted to do erotic entertainment on the off chance that she is able to keep her profession and not be kicked out to belong to streets. The mindset of the crowd who hope to see her being sexualized and her crazed fans who refuse to accept her acts of maturity throughout her career only burdengingly add to the darkness that consumes her. Not only Kon’s work as a director shines in his visually appalling debut but also his mysterious and thought provoking method of storytelling.   

In Satoshi Kon’s 2001 work, Millennium Actress, he creates yet again another masterpiece featuring an actress on the search for her self declared love. Millennium Actress is a heartbreaking drama that plays with reality and fiction to tell a complex story full of brilliant twists and turns. The film includes, similarly, a previous star, Chiyoko Fujiwara, and her two questionnaires making a documentary about her life. Our now old-aged star welcomes us (the viewer) and these two men into a biography so hypnotizing it takes on its very own existence, mixing and disguising reality with the many films that epitomized her life as she featured in them. It’s like a book in many ways, dragging us into its own animated universe and asking us to simply contemplate what the story is really conveying. After a sudden yet brief interaction with a man she finds a key left behind and feels a life changing attraction towards it and what it could unlock. The man lived for some time after, however she never had the chance to see him again. This moment in her life defined all that followed in it, causing a dream, one where she would use her acting abilities to take her places to meet him again and broadcast her adoration for him. She realizes near the end of her remarkable life that it was not the end goal that drove her that mattered but the meaningful journey working towards it. At the final moment the riddle completely uncovers itself. Just toward the end do we recognize what occurred at the last scene of Chiyoko’s last film. All in all, it gives us the chance to connect with the story in any way we desire, as our interactions both suck us deeper and become our only connection to reality. Minor subtleties add a desire to move quickly to each scene, and insinuate what’s continuing, making a colossal feeling of rewatch-ability. On top of his mind bending storytelling abilities he also displays excellent editing skills that only add to the overall film. Matching scene transitions, influenced originally by sci-fi movies, become an iconic signature-esque quality within his work. Satoshi Kon’s successful efforts towards creating fascinating yet also intimate artistic work within an animation go nearly unmatched compared to contemporaries.

In the opening of his 2006 work, Paprika, it has five dream sequences that are all connected by his signature match cuts which undoubtedly sets the scene for the film. The film is about Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a scientist who also works as a “dream detective” during the night. Dr. Chiba is building a machine that provides mental care for psychiatric patients. When the machine is stolen she must go on a quest to retrieve it before it is used for evil. Within Kon’s films you can’t worry over what goes on in the fantasy world. In Paprika the procession of toys, for example, is a morbid projection of mainstream society. Things covered somewhere down in our inner mind are fit for reemerging in dreams, regardless of what structure. When you acknowledge the fantasy world for what it is, you can value Paprika’s most prominent trait: the stunning and alluring animation. Regardless of how scenes may make you react, such an innate showcase of irregularity throughout beautiful colors and overall animation causes you to feel something and make an intimate connection to the work Kon has created. While the grand theme of the film is conveying a consumer-based culture and how the media dominates its consumers it isn’t overly worried about offering a significant cultural expression. Paprika instead makes a world brimming with incredibly intriguing and complex characters sifted through a creative, confused yet joining plot. The DC Mini, the machine made to invade one’s fantasies, is an illustration of the bigger picture while symbolizing what the media does to a consumer-based culture. Paprika is less about a scientist/dream detective on the hunt for her stolen super gadget but more about the effects of consumer-based society. Much like the rest of Satoshi Kon’s other films it’s content consistently works towards something much greater than it may originally seem. 

Satoshi Kon’s incredible work has cemented him as, at the very least, one of the most artistically well done, reality bending directors and storytellers in animation. A great deal of his artistic statements lie in how his characters react to the conflicts they face within the setting, especially within Millennium Actress. His cinema not only is full of mind boggling, intimate stories that make you feel something but is also meaningful and displays incredible awareness in Japanese social issues. Few wildly artistic and creative minds like Satoshi Kon have the chance to inspire significant change and that is exactly what he accomplished. 

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