Perfect Blue

I was very eager to see this movie. It's rare, for reasons that elude me, to be able to view an anime on the big screen. The USA is a 99.9% video only land for anime. Perfect Blue managed to have a screening in little old Seattle, where I live thanks to Manga Entertainment. I think they figured that people might actually have some interest in this film because it was directed by Satoshi Kon who is a protege of Katsuhiro Otomo who directed Akira. Akira was, to my memory, the first well screened anime in the US. As a matter of fact, Legend of the Overfiend as about the only other anime I can think of that has had much success on the big screen. Probably even more important from a marketing standpoint was the inclusion of nudity and violence with a Hitchock flair. Hitchock was mentioned in many of the reviews. No one dares to say anything bad about old 'Hitch', so I guess this is a compliment. My suspicions were that it really wasn't that Hitchock like but the reviewers didn't know what else to compare it to, and didn't trust themselves to sound smart enough by giving a basic description of how the movie made them feel. The nudity and violence angle doesn't bother me too much. It get peoples attention, and that sort of stuff has been selling good and bad stories for centuries.
I really enjoyed watching Perfect Blue in the theatre. The artwork was very good, so seeing everything blown up larger than life made it all very impressive. I had to change seats once. There was a guy sitting right in front of me who was giggling at everything in the animation. He seemed to think that since this was a cartoon, it must be something like Scooby-Doo, and anything serious was just a joke. As the tension on screen began developing, it just became too annoying to hear snickering following every line. It's still a rocky road to understanding for anime in America.
You quickly find that this movie is about one person, the main character, Mima, an idol singer who has just left a band called 'Cham', a fairly nondescript trio of girls in painfully cute outfits. She gets onto a soap opera. A big break for this actress wanna-be. I worried as her manager complains that she is hardly getting any lines. Nervously she practices her only line over and over. But things progress and she gets to have her on stage character developed, and she starts making more a a presence on the daytime drama. Her scenes get sexier. Some of her fans from her Cham days don't like these changes one bit. And she notices at least one fan web page has more information about her than makes her comfortable.
As the movie progresses Mima has trouble telling the difference between what is real, and what is the television show, and it maybe...just maybe...she has been involved with some of the attacks on the staff of the show and her managers. As you watch you get confused. The movie becomes dream-like, like one of those dreams you wake from, but you wonder, even if for only a few seconds, if anything you remember from your dream might be real. The movie does resolve itself into a satisfying ending, unlike the aforementioned Akira that leaves most people impressed but not sure what actually happened.
Mima is realistically portrayed as a really nice girl trying to make her way in her career as best she can. Her personality is such that you want her to succeed, but wonder if she is just too delicate and ungrounded for something like a television career. Her apartment is amazing for its realism. It's the type of apartment that most Americans (and I suspect some Japanese) would call 'cozy' while giving a saracastic facial expression. In truth it was small and cozy -- a very believable place for a young single girl to live in. Simple acts like shopping for groceries is done with artistry and attention to detail, refreshing in a medium that sometimes relies too much on the spectatcular.
Unlike many animes, Perfect Blue takes place in the late ninties with fairly ordinary people, which actually makes the audience judge the acting of the characters and the design of the sets with a keener eye than the viewer of fantasy based anime. The animation manages to sustain a sense of realism and mature drama thorughout. It's not a long film, 1hr 20min, but it has lots in it. As a matter of fact, it was something of the pleasure to see a story like this not drawn out into some sort of OAV. That being said, the ending is a bit too simple. It's not a terrible ending, but it is not not to the quality of the rest of the story.
Before you see this, let me give a final warning. There is lots of violence, some nudity , and upsetting scenes.