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Directed by Satoshi Kon. Screenplay by Sadayuki Murai, based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. Starring the voices of Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto, Shinpachi Tsuji, Masaaki Okura. (Japanese version.)
81 minutes.
Mima is a pop idol. Her group, Cham, have a decent following, but they've never made it into the charts. That's why her managers have decided she should make the shift to an actress on the tv soap opera Double Bind. But some of Mima's fans don't like this change, and at least one of them is willing to kill to get the old Mima back. Or maybe it's Mima herself. Even she isn't sure...
So far, so ordinary, right? But Perfect Blue has a number of qualities that lift it above the usual stalker thriller, starting with the fact that it's animated. Yes, Perfect Blue is an animated Japanese movie - anime.
If you hate anime, well, so do I - for the most part. But Perfect Blue is not your typical anime. As you'll have guessed from the plot description, there's no giant robots or demon monsters or any of the usual nonsense. What we have instead is a great psychological horror movie crossed with a mind-fuck movie. Which brings me to Perfect Blue's other main asset.
A large part of the movie takes place almost within Mima's headspace, and it's not a pleasant place to be. Mima has turned over a lot of the decision-making in her life to her managers, and she finds the sudden changes very disorienting. When she finds that people close to her are being killed, and discovers that the killer seems to be intimately aware of every tiny detail of her life, her mind starts to unravel. Hallucinations and reality shifts occur almost constantly, and the lines blur between reality, dreams and hallucinations; between Mima's real life, her former life as a pop idol, and the character she is playing on the tv show.
Perfect Blue is visually beautiful. Being anime, the animation is not up to the standard of a mega-budget monster from somewhere like Disney or Pixar, but the design work is beautiful, and director Satoshi Kon plays with the conventions of anime and manga constantly, changing the level of detail from scene to scene, making some "real life" scenes seem flat and some "fantasy" scenes more realistic, then abruptly switching the two, keeping the audience off balance.
The first time I watched Perfect Blue I was coming down from an intense LSD experience. This could have been a very, very bad idea, as the movie is not only a mindfuck but is often extremely violent, but fortunately I am very psychologically stable, and I was in the company of a woman I was in love with at the time, so I made it through the movie without incident. The acid intensified my feelings of disorientation.
I watched it again later after partaking of a few bowls of pot, and found the experience once again very enjoyable. Familiarity with the movie allowed me to travel through it with more comprehension this time, but the emotional intensity of being inside Mima's head was still fairly overwhelming.
I'd suggest watching Perfect Blue in Japanese if possible. Even though the subtitles are badly done and quite intrusive - typical for subtitles in anime - that's preferable to the annoying English dubbed voices, particularly that of Mr. Me-Mania. Mima is actually quite capably dubbed by Ruby Marlowe (though she occasionally sinks to the "bimbo voice" that pisses me off so much about female anime characters) but the men's voices are typically cartoonish, which detracts from the serious tone of the movie.
Also, there are subtle differences in the sound design in the two versions, and it's my feeling after watching Perfect Blue several times in several configurations that the Japanese soundtrack is simply better. However, if you can't get a Japanese dub, see the movie anyway; the dubbing doesn't by any means spoil the movie.
It was interesting to compare the translations of the dubbing and of the subtitles, as they were often markedly different, not just in phrasing but in the meaning of crucial lines of dialogue. I couldn't tell you which is the more faithful of the two, because I don't speak Japanese.
In conclusion: this is the best animated movie for grown-ups that I've ever seen. I'd offer a warning that it contains some fairly extreme violence, including sexual violence, but that (in contrast to much anime I have seen; hell, it's in contrast to most movies of ANY kind) this is never gratuitous and is always essential to the story; Perfect Blue requires the extremism of violence to make its points, and redeems them by making the worst of them painful and human moments that we look at through the eyes of the victim.
Ten out of ten. One of my favourites.
© 2002 Joey Narcotic.