Dreaming about Dreams (Paprika)

Satoshi Kon was a dreamer. One only has to look at his rich yet short career to see how much he was able to achieve. Of course, like anyone, Kon was a dreamer who never fully realized his dreams. Perhaps the closest we will ever get to a masterpiece from him is Paprika. As it stands now and will always stand, Paprika is Kon's masterpiece, his magnum opus. Paprika is also all about dreams and the idea of invading dreams. Plenty has been written on this and as such, there isn't much left to say from the perspective of someone who has so far only seen two Kon films. The other being Ohayo, a short film he released in 2008, just two years after Paprika. Ohayo also happened to be Kon's last film. He would later die in 2010 from pancreatic cancer. Although Ohayo was not meant to be Kon's last film, it so happened that a story about waking up suddenly put to sleep an established career.

It is evident that Kon was obsessed with dreams. His themes and editing styles are quite literally the stuff of dreams. Possibly, his biggest influence was in fact dreaming. With this viewpoint in mind, Ohayo seems to be a far bigger film than the length of it would suggest. Ohayo depicts the very process of moving from the world of dreams into the real one. As the film depicts, the process is not easy nor pleasant. The character lags behind an identical image of itself as slowly the two parts, the dreaming and the awake, reconnect to form a whole being. Kon thought that dreams made up what a person was. Perhaps Paprika was meant to show how those dreams were to be unique to people and not be tampered with. Perhaps it shows what happens when we try to separate reality and dreaming from each other. Unfortunately, Kon never had the time to fully explore what he had set out to conquer. Paprika remains to be his last thoughts on dreaming and the process of it and as most of his films, it does it in a masterful way.