Film Analysis Of Kon Satoshi: Director Of The Surreal

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Zach Love Kon Satoshi: Director of the Surreal My paper focuses on Kon Satoshi’s four anime movies that he directed. They are, in order of release, Perfect Blue (1997), Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003), and Paprika (2006.) While I plan to analyze these movies from multiple angles, one of the main overarching topics will of course be Kon’s trademark surrealism. The way Kon blends realistic portrayals with other dream-like sequences is very interesting. These are honestly not some of my favorite films from a purely entertainment focused lens as I tend to prefer something a little more straightforward, but they are certainly interesting to analyze because of the sharp contrasts between reality and the surreal. All of Kon’s works are also very original stories This one is about a man (Genya) interviewing a retired actress (Chiyoko) that he greatly admires. Realities blend between past and present, using both Chiyoko’s real life as well as scenes from her movies. The actual plot isn’t as important for the analyzation of Kon as Perfect Blue’s was, but I will touch on it to provide a background for a few examples of how he continued to expertly use surreality in this movie as well. The story is based around Chiyoko telling Genya her about her life. It starts with her as a young girl in 1930s Japan being recruited to be an actress. Shortly afterwards, she meets a man who is running away from the police. She lets him hide at her house, and it turns out he is a painter and a revolutionary in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Eventually he has to escape, but Chiyoko wants to track him down. Chiyoko decides to accept the offer to become an actress so that maybe one day the man will see her in a movie and know how to find her. This all plays out with present day Genya and his cameraman (Kyoji) in the story, being able to view and interact with the story that is being told to them first

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