FILM

CREEPY BUT BEAUTIFUL

Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue is Perfectly Disturbing

by Mirror Tang

A different type of anime

When I was seven years old, I saw Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away for the first time. I was hooked and watched more and more Japanese anime. I loved the way Miyazaki and his proteges emphasized courage, friendship and adventure. However, the summer after graduating from high school, I accidentally watched an anime film that did not fit this description--Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue. The whole film had nothing to do with friendship, or love, or heart-warming stories; instead, it made me extremely upset and uncomfortable and yet I immediately fell in love with this strange film. Its creepy style and moving story have polarized audiences around the world. Some say Kon is a genius, a fortune teller, some think he shouldn’t be making animated films at all, I think he is doing something quite special and fascinating.

Whatever the case, this is not a story you will soon forget. Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller about a pop idol named Mima who is making a kind of slight career change into acting. Her role in a popular TV series increasingly merges her real life with her fictional one. She’s being stalked by a man who has started up a Mima website in which he pretends to be her, writing fictional diary entries of her life. Kon is clearly interested in the razor’s edge between reality and fantasy.

Perfect Blue is different from most anime films and certainly most anime films of the late 1990’s: There is no magic, imaginative creatures or beautiful scenery or new, exotic worlds. What you get is daily life: streets, companies, people, apartments, subways. Everything seems so realistic that none of it seems like an anime world at all. Kon’s “realistic” style also extends to the characters. Almost every action in the film is realistic and is part of our normal world, but that is part of what makes Kon’s tricky strategy so effective. Although the film is realistic, the story itself is full of dreams and fantasies. Consequently, every scene in the film seems real and that makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Does she even know who she is?

Besides the overall animation style, Kon also pays a lot of attention to color choices in Perfect Blue. Unlike Miyazaki who uses a lot of fresh and light colors to build a harmonious world, Kon’s color palette makes people uncomfortable. He uses cold, greyish tones and accents them with bright, high-saturated colors. They pop up in unsettling ways throughout the film. In this way, we understand the characters by the way the color changes and mutates around them.

At the beginning of the film, Mima is performing a pop concert. Kon uses mid-range, saturated colors to portray the chaotic and noisy scene in the audience. In contrast, Mima stands out in her white and pink dress. The color white implies purity and catches Mima’s state of mind while an idol singer. Every time she doubts herself, she sees an illusion of herself in this white dress who tells her that she is dirty and not qualified to be the “real” Mima anymore.

When she was a "real" pop idol

This white outfit reminds Mima of her waning happiness and any idea of purity. When Mima starts to become an actress on a television show, she has to pretend that she’s getting raped. Her white dress is similar to the one she wears as a pop idol. When it’s violently ripped off her during the scene, Mima’s vision starts to blue and she gradually loses her consciousness. At this point, she loses her old identity completely -- her fictional rape seems to pollute her mind and she’s never able to play the pop idol again. It is as if her identity is teared up the same as her dress. After the scene, Mima wears a black suit. The color black implies that she is grieving for an identity that she can never get back.

As the name of the film suggests, blue should be an important color. The film critic Chris Peach points out: “Colour is a huge theme in Perfect Blue, though that applies mostly to the color red. Well, almost exclusively so…. So, why “Perfect Blue”? We can come to the most apparent conclusion, that being blue has always been the color of melancholia, sadness, and depression. I think this attributes to the name. After all, the set of circumstances within the film is – in some sense – a perfection of melancholia… even madness. They’re a culmination of various mental states gone awry.”

It might be perfect blue, but red's the color

But as Alison Gremillion points out, “Red is the warmest and most dynamic of the colors—it triggers opposing emotions. If you want to draw attention to a design element, use red. But using it as an accent color can be overwhelming.” I think Kon takes a risky step by employing red heavily throughout the film. So, when we see this red, we feel uncomfortable and notice that things are not alright.

Besides color, Kon utilizes various techniques to tell us many of the same things that the colors are telling us. For example, Mima is acting in a rape scene for the TV show she stars in. When the shooting starts, the camera tilts up, mimicking and implying an erection and that the men of the production crew are having a rather unsavory reaction to what is happening to her. The scene reveals a kind of toxic masculinity that Mima is psychologically ill-equipped to deal with. Unconsciously she must understand that she is not an actress to them, but a just a female body present for their viewing pleasure.

The fish are strange and caught somewhere between life and death

After Mima gets home, she goes to take care of her beloved goldfish. When Mima looks closer, she finds that they are all dead. The fish are an important symbol in the film and their dying symbolizes the death of the Mima’s idol identity. In her mind, she is not qualified to be an idol anymore, not clean and pure enough to be appreciated by her fans. She loses her mind and starts to get angry. Suddenly she hears a voice laughing at her. She sees herself in her idol costume or identity and then she looks back at the tank and two of the fish are still alive. It’s a creepy scene. The two fish represent the two Mima we see: One is Mima the pop idol and the other is Mima the actress who suffers from being watched. Later in the story, Mima finds herself in a room exactly the same as hers. However, all the fish are alive. It turns out that she is in her manger, Rumi's apartment. Clearly, the two young women are having difficulties establishing stable identities or even understanding that they are different people.

What’s clear is that mirrors are an important part of Kon’s vision. In fact, it’s not really mirrors, but anything that reflects one’s appearance, such as glass, screens, or even fish tanks. There are a number of times in the film when Mima looks at or maybe into her reflection and sees the idol Mima speaking to her. 

As in life, everything is a reflection

In a strange way, the Mima website is just another reflection of Mima. Kon makes a wise decision in how he blurs fantasy and reality. When we see the idol Mima in the mirror, we know that Mima is hallucinating. But in the last scene, we see the idol Mima is right in front of real Mima, and we know from the reflection in the mirror that it is actually Rumi. Here the reality and fantasy exchange positions, which blurs the boundaries between truth and lies. It is as if Kon is making an all-out assault on our notion of reality.

After watching all of Kon’s works, I see his influence in later, famous films such as Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, and Inception. In Perfect Blue, he aims to destroy the idea of a stable identity. We have many questions after watching the film, such as who killed three murder victims? Mima or Me-mania (her stalking fan)? Who creates the website? Rumi or Me-mania? Is Mima real or Yoko (the character Mima played in the TV show) real? But I think the point is we don’t need to figure out what is true. Pursuing truth is not the key to understanding the film, but accepting chaos and instability is. That is really the genius of Kon.

©Mirror Tang and the CCA Arts Review