Satoshi Kon
Birthday: October 12, 1963
Notable Works: Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika
I first encountered the work of Satoshi Kon in 2005 or 2006 when Paranoia Agent was running on Adult Swim. I was a teenager and was really just discovering anime as a concept. Paranoia Agent along with Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex had quite an effect on my malleable young mind, introducing me to a whole host of things that anime could be.
Kon deals in discussions of the psyche and of societal ills without hesitation. Kon never takes to the pulpit in his works, though. He shows things as he sees them, and allows the reality he portrays to do the preaching for him. But this alone probably wasn’t enough to capture my attention back when you could watch Paranoia Agent legally and without hassle.
Kon explores his messages by setting up mysteries and blurring the line of truth and fiction within his sub-creation. A Kon work is a labyrinth of waking dreams where harmless cartoon characters can become grim specters of a society tuning out its own troubles. His movies are filled with the clutter and debris of culture, pop and otherwise, often standing in for the clutter and debris of the mind.
In last night’s post, I compared elements of Millennium Actress to Don Quixote. Panning the camera out to look at Kon’s filmography, I think it’s fair to say that almost every heroic character in his work has an element of Quixote.
Kon tends to portray the world, at least for those well off enough to live comfortably, as almost malevolently bland. There is a sense in many of his works that all the soft-edged pop culture and convenience of the modern world is a dangerous sedative. It dulls the senses and blinds characters to the much harsher realities around them. But Kon’s solution isn’t necessarily radical.
His protagonists, like the Man of La Mancha himself, tilt at windmills except sometimes they find giants. This usually takes the form of living and thinking outside accepted norms, indulging in fantasy and tiptoeing around the brink of madness.
Often times, even characters that appear more grounded are eventually shown to be living in a sort of fantasy. This can happen to his heroes and villains. The protagonist of Paranoia Agent, Detective Keiichi Ikari, is an old-fashioned officer trying to sort the world into neat good and evil categories. He has a strong moral compass and truly wants to help people, but even he is shown to be manipulated by the allure of simple cops-and-robbers thinking.
As I discussed with Millennium Actress, Kon’s works also tend to be trimmed of all the fat. If specific details don’t advance the story, they’re not likely to be found. We don’t need to know many details about the cast of Paprika beyond the basics of their relationships and the dynamics of the moment. And yet his characters feel real. They’re realized in the moment, and we don’t need to see their childhood to know they had one.
I’m going to forgo a lot of the basic biographical touches on this piece. Kon went to Musashino Art University and graduated with a degree in graphic design. He was influenced by works like Mobile Suit Gundam and Future Boy Conan. He got his start as a mangaka and worked on several anime and manga besides his own.
He passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2010. He left behind an unfinished film, a letter from his deathbed, and his wife and parents. His filmography is small and difficult to obtain outside Japan and especially in the U.S., but it has been influential nonetheless. Darren Aronofsky, director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, was a friend of Kon and bought the copyright for Perfect Blue with intention of using it in Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky denies the influence, but Black Swan is essentially the same story as Perfect Blue.
I’ve written 661 words so far, and I feel like this is entirely too short for a post on Satoshi Kon. After the challenge is completed, I’ll likely be revisiting Kon’s work, but I’m not going to ramble on much further. Until tomorrow!
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