Reviews

EMPIRE ****

The buzz that sprang around Japanese animation when AKIRA and a very few other amazing movies showed up in the West has dwindled somewhat, with video sell-through shelves groaning under the weight of repetitive, noisy anime about shrill gun-toting Lolitas, demon rapists and giant robot warriors. This striking picture is about as far as it's possible to get from those conventions, pullijng off the rare trick of telling a story woth doing in live action while managing visual effects only possible in the cartoon medium.

The leading character is Mima Kirigoe, a 21-year-old pop idol who ditches the pink stockings and ballet dress of her bubblegum trio to forge a new career as an actress on a television psycho drama. The problem is the old image seems not to want to be ditched and begins to persecute the real girl, acting through a violent fan and an internet home-page that presents a creepily well-informed but bogus diary. Mima, egged on by her agent and cautioned by his assistant (herself an ex-idol), further trashes her squeaky-clean persona by taking part in a lurid rape scene and posing for nude photographs, whereupon the plots of real life and the TV series blend disorientingly, a couple of violent murders take place, and Mima finds herself menaced by the apparent ghost of her former self.

Though it's a neat woman-in-peril thriller, this is most striking as a look into the life of a Japanese media sensation, used up at the end of her teens, and squashed into a tiny appartment with her goldfish and too many ghosts. The film even goes as far as to expose the bizarre steak of paedophilia in Japanese pop culture, whereby it's all right for a doll-like girl child to be a fantasy object but a sexual woman is shockinglytransgressive. PERFECT BLUE is scary, funny, poignant and thoughtful, but also delivers thriller set pieces that rank with the best of De Palma or Argento, marking director Satoshi Kon as a name to watch.     

Kim Newman

TIME OUT (London)

Satoshi Kon's strong debut feature contradicts the assumption that all Japanese animation belongs at the sci-fi end of the fantasy spectrum. Mima is the most pathetic of all showbiz fihures, a teen pop idol, lead singer of an all-girl group which has had it's 15 minutes and is on the way out. Manipulated by others all her life, she submits to her manager Tadokoro's demand that she go solo and change her image by taking a 'bad girl' role in a TV soap. Soon, though, disturbing things start to happen - especially after she has steeled herself to shoot a scene in which she is raped. She starts seeing a 'shadow double' of herself (a malign version of her pop-star self), finds her private diary posted on the internet, and imagines herself stalked by a monstrous figure straight out of a slasher movie. The old 'Diaboliques' conundrum raises its head: is she 'merely' cracking up, or is someone really out to get her?

PERFECT BLUE follows Polanski's REPULSION into some fairly grown-up areas: the vulnerability of one's sense of self; the flimsiness of a public persona; the price to be paid for female complicity with male fantasies. If the material never quite transcends the genre, there's no doubt that doing it as an animated feature gives it an edge. Despite the usual cost-saving short cuts, the animation is rather fine: striking compositions, beautiful backrounds, good pacing. At its best, the film works both as a critique of Japan's pop-culture 'system' and as an effective woman-in-peril psychothriller.

Tony Rayns

TOTAL FILM ****

Japanese anime has a reputation for big bullets, bizarre sex and explosive bloodshed - all at once in the more extreme examples. Hence most of the flicks remain beloved on the cult circuit and rarely register with regular cinema goers. However, Satoshi Kon's masterly thriller has the potential to break this stereotype.

Far from being a violent comic-book adventure set to a bad rock soundtrack, the story explores the dire physical and psychological consequences of celebrity on young pop icon Mima as she attempts to break into a serious acting career. First she gains a stalker, then people around her start dying in a brutal fashion.

All the elements of a modern Hitchcock-style murder mystery are brilliantly handled, while the sort of tricks usuallt deployed to misdirect the audience are intelligently positioned to draw us deeper into Mima's tortured psyche untill fantasy blurs into a deadly reality. The result is a smart, innovative and gut-wrentchingly disturbing film.     ****

Essi Berelian

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