verbify I'm trying to figure out why Miyazaki is the only anime director I really like. I'm starting to think it has to do with his ability to create very convincing characters in very brief scenes, something this movie generally fails at. There are two-line talking frogs in Spirited Away that have more character than some of the main ones here. There are no characters in this movie. Everybody is a thumbnail. And it doesn't add up where every character is an element in a single character, like the fragmentary characters in actual dreams. Everybody feels hollow.That said, the visuals are gorgeous and uniformly memorable, the scene transitions are very fun to watch, and it's all scored very nicely. I enjoyed it. It just wasn't interesting.

Alex Nichiporuk The best way to describe this movie to someone is to ask them if they ever watched Alice in Wonderland.Satoshi Kon has always had a thing for duality as the core theme in this movies, whether it is Mima's private and public image in Perfect Blue, Chiyoko's heart-wrenching story both on screen and off-screen in Millennium Actress, or the salvation and destruction of family in Tokyo Godfathers. In Paprika, it is reality and dreams that play as the tools for this theme when a device allows the user and others to observe and even delve into their own and other's dreams.Paprika's beautiful animation accompanied with hypnotizing music made this a real treat to watch. I was pretty confused at first on what was going on, but knew enough to not get completely lost. This movie accurately portrays just how absurd dreams are and Paprika shows what happens when we allow our subconscious to run amok, causing chaos and confusion, sometimes in beautiful ways. Characters were very fun to watch and the story, whether absurd or grounded, is engaging to follow along.Overall, I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone interested in Kon's work or wants to try something a little out of the norm for anime.

SnoopyStyle Doctor Atsuko Chiba uses her alter-ego Paprika to treat police detective Toshimi Konakawa and his unsolved case in his recurring dream. Chiba, man-child genius Doctor Kōsaku Tokita and Doctor Toratarō Shima are running a secret program to enter into other people's dreams using the DC Mini. When the DC MIni is stolen in an inside job, people's dreams start to get invaded. The wheelchair bound chairman Doctor Seijirō Inui puts up roadblocks on the investigation.The wild dreamworld is amazing. It is imaginative and creepy. The story is another dreamworld mystery. It does need to work on the real world aspects. It needs to distinguish the real world from the dream world in the first half of the movie. When the worlds start to blend, the audience needs to feel it. The movie as it is never seems to leave the dreamworld. The dreams loses cohesiveness but it never loses its wonder. This is a superb visually wild movie.

Anssi Vartiainen Paprika must have inspired Inception on some level, I'm sure of it. The film tells a story about a corporation that has come up with a machine that enables psychiatrists to infiltrate dreams and to help their patients through intensive dream therapy. Obviously something goes wrong along the way and its up to our protagonists to sort out the mess before the collective dreaming of the world comes to an end.Whereas Inception relies on heavily defied rules of dreaming and the aesthetic of gangster movies to pull in its viewers, Paprika is just plain weird. All the various dreams are heavily symbolic, full of bizarre creations and scenes and make little to no sense at all. Both styles have their pros and cons, and Paprika does a good job of lending credibility to its artistic view. It's a gorgeous movie with a soundtrack that easily keeps up and contains quite a few earworms. The story itself is slightly convoluted and very fast-paced, but not so much that it becomes unwatchable. It's a movie that requires your full attention, but I cannot really see that as a flaw.Furthermore, the various characters are all individualistic, sympathetic and nicely animated. Paprika, the eponymous dreamwalker persona of Chiba Atsuko, is especially a simple delight to watch and follow. Cheerful, determined, peppy, charismatic. A great protagonist, in a nutshell. The villain of the movie isn't as strong in comparison, but (s)he's not horrible by any means.I'd say that Paprika is a great gateway into anime. It represents the best of its kind, is a fully realized cinematic experience, yet the trademark weirdness of anime is perfectly explained by its premise so it doesn't feel alienating to first-time viewers. It's colourful, it's fun, it's thoughtful, it's all around satisfying.