Where to begin with Satoshi Kon

When Satoshi Kon’s early films first made their way to the west, something that threw off certain critics of the day was the question of what kinds of stories ‘needed’ to be told in animation. Trained on the idea that big-screen animation was the reserve of family entertainment, or at least the fantastical, some writers would find merit in the films but still question why they weren’t produced for live-action. They weren’t about anthropomorphised animals or inanimate objects given sentience. Instead, they were about ordinary humans undergoing extraordinary experiences that you could nonetheless still imagine being performed by onscreen actors.

As Japanese animation’s cultural standing globally has only accelerated since the early 2000s, such attitudes seem quaint, especially when grounded works from the Studio Ghibli library, like Grave of the Fireflies (1988), inspire as much devotion in western fans as the studio’s fantasy tales. Primarily collaborating with powerhouse animation studio Madhouse, Satoshi Kon has arguably become the key gateway filmmaker for viewers first dipping their toes into serious-minded adult animation.

Part of that’s attributable to his films’ apparent – though not always explicitly acknowledged – influence on directors such as Christopher Nolan, the Daniels duo and Darren Aronofsky. To mainly frame an animation creative in relation to live-action peers does a disservice to everyone concerned, though Kon, who also dabbled in screenwriting and manga artistry, notably pointed to live-action cinema, rather than contemporary anime trends, as informing his approach to screen storytelling.

In 2010, Kon died tragically young from cancer at 46, leaving behind a small filmography but a large legacy. His four features as director have only become more acclaimed with time – both for pushing the formal boundaries of theatrical animation and for their prescient focus on parasocial relationships exacerbated through technology.

Animation infrequently comes up in discussions of the greatest directorial debuts, but rarely has an artist arrived as fully formed as Kon did with the psychological horror Perfect Blue (1997). The director’s masterful experimentation with time, space and reality, through editing especially, is honed right off the bat for this loose adaptation of a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. 

Its protagonist is a former pop idol, Mima, struggling with the jump to an acting career. Pressure to prove herself as a serious actress obstructs her comfort and her agency, and changes to the image she’s previously projected to the world trigger stalking and murderous actions in a ‘betrayed’ fan.

As an online blogger also impersonates her with disturbingly accurate details, Mima becomes unable to discern what’s real and what’s one of the various roles she’s made to play. Perfect Blue is a chilling thriller about how violence – especially sexual violence – evolves as the media grows in its capacity for enabling surveillance. Kon’s debut has also become only more relevant as a study of the ways in which the versions we craft of ourselves for public consumption can obscure who we really are. It foresees an age where everyday people, not just celebrities, perform a created persona for even the tiniest social media following.

If you need a palette cleanser after Perfect Blue, the closest thing Kon made to a traditional heart-warmer is your next stop. Inspired by Peter B. Kyne’s 1913 western novel The Three Godfathers, which had previously been adapted by directors including William Wyler and John Ford, Tokyo Godfathers (2003) sees a makeshift family of unhoused people try to find the parents of an abandoned newborn. One of the great modern Christmas movies, Tokyo Godfathers finds beauty in people drawn to being together despite all manner of complex histories, heartbreaks and bad luck.

Love also drives Kon’s miraculous Millennium Actress (2001), though its protagonist more actively pursues this emotion in people, art, anything she can. Through the framing device of documentarians interviewing a reclusive, retired film actress, Kon’s nesting-doll narrative takes us on a propulsive journey through intertwined cinema history and collective memory. Millennium Actress is one of the definitive artistic statements on the idea of cinema as the ultimate act of remembrance, one that can grant lives a form of immortality.

Far from an outlier curio for completists, each of the 13 episodes of TV series Paranoia Agent (2004 to 2005) – all written and directed or co-directed by Kon – is an essential text in his oeuvre. There’s a narrative throughline involving an investigation into serial violent attacks, but each instalment takes an anthology-like approach to see how different people in a community are affected by a spreading contagion of fear concerning the barely glimpsed boogeyman who terrorises their streets. Whether this figure is real or not is questioned through Kon’s riveting exploration of how mass hysteria and warped perception can bring figments of our imaginations to life.

In Paprika (2006), the director’s interest in the blurred lines between fantasy and reality reached an apex with a narrative about entering and manipulating dreams – though who knows how Kon’s unfinished follow-up Dreaming Machine could have taken a similar concept further. Kon had wanted to adapt Yasutaka Tsutsui’s sci-fi novel Paprika as one of his first forays into directing, but the eventual project ended up being his unwitting swansong.

In the film, a thief steals an experimental device that allows people to record and watch their dreams, causing chaos by using the machine to enter others’ psyches when they’re not even asleep. While some people have harped on about similarities between Paprika and Christopher Nolan’s later dreamscape epic Inception (2010), Kon’s film is a shining example of the sort of fluid visuals and editing only possible in top-tier animation. When released in English-language markets in 2007, Paprika had the quite silly tagline, “This is your brain on anime.” But as reductive as that may have been, it does get at something about how Kon was among the major creative voices expanding our comprehension of a medium’s possibilities.

Before directing, Kon’s primary screen contributions outside of background and layout designs were as a writer. He co-wrote Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo’s first live-action film as director, World Apartment Horror (1991), a collaboration that led to one of the greatest short-form works in anime history. The crown jewel of sci-fi anthology feature Memories (1995), based around three original stories by Otomo, Magnetic Rose is directed by Koji Morimoto with Kon on screenwriter duty. Visually and aurally sumptuous, Magnetic Rose riffs on Alien (1979) in following a blue-collar space crew’s answering of a distress call, before transforming into something more surprising and heartbreaking. It’s a thrilling rumination on how living in the past can lead to stewing in decay.