Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven Christmas 2003 has already yeilded me a fairly impressive stack of DVDs, thanks to people not knowing what the heck to buy me and therefore loading me down with gift cards. I've already done one review about an anime I picked up with said gift cards, rationalizing that since it really wasn't my money it wouldn't be wasteful to take the terrible risk and actually buy an anime without knowing anything about it. You'd think that I'd have learned my lesson. Well, enter Borders. Not only did I have a gift card to burn through, but they were also running a special: buy four DVDs, get one free. That means that if I were to buy four movies with my already free gift card, the fifth movie would be even free-er! I did some quick calculations and deduced that $0 + $0 + $0 + $0 + Free = $0 wasn't all that bad of a deal, so what the heck. I'd give this whole "blindly buying anime without doing any research about it" thing another try. This is a Pepsi commercial waiting to happen. This time, though, I knew I wanted a movie and not a "special" that's supposed to fit in with a series. I wanted to get away from the mainstream and try to find something... I don't know. Different. Something without wild pink hair and jumbo-sized sweatdrops. Ooh! How about a psychological thriller? Says right here on the box, underneath a blurb of text saying something about how this movie is what would happen if Hitchcock and Disney ever hooked up. That's the story of how Perfect Blue ended up coming home with me, neatly tucked in between Shrek and Iron Giant and my brother's Bill & Ted movies. Being a sucker for a good psychological thriller (key word: good) I thought this time I'd really picked up a winner. ...and, action. Characters: Perfect Blue is centered around pop icon Mima Kirigoe as she gives up her glamorous career as a member of a bubblegum girl-band Cham to be an actress. Right off the bat we get the feeling this decision was made for her by an ambitious agent. Indeed, Mima's assistant (and something of a protective mother figure) Rumi doesn't like the idea at all. Nonetheless, things are in motion to get Mima a minor part on a hit TV show to start her uphill battle into super stardom. Aaaah! Product placement! Rapid fire, we're introduced to a wide variety of players: the other two bright-eyed and bushy-tailed members of Cham, a trio of gabby Cham fanboys who constantly bat rumors and trivia back and forth, a really creepy guy who is so busy stalking Mima that he can't find time to visit a dentist, the stars of the TV series Mima is going to be part of... and Mima's fish. This represents virtually every onscreen entity in the film, and they're all shoved down our gullet practically even before the title has faded. Perfect Blue doesn't let the viewer get too close to any of these characters except (of course) Mima herself, and this actually serves the film quite well. As Mima's reality gets more and more blurry, these characters switch roles like you and I might change socks. The whole movie is seen from Mima's perspective, and since her perspective gets more and more maddening as time rolls on, the people around her start to lose form and structure. Is the blond lady really a doctor or just playing one on TV? Is the creepy guy just a well-meaning but overly-obsessive fan, a prankster webmaster, or a violent rapist? Perfect Blue does a bang-up job portraying the disturbing reality of someone who can't even figure herself out by presenting all the people around her as a faded mosaic. Picking out which parts of the players are real and which are fabrications is impossible right on up to the movie's conclusion, and even then it's tough to be certain. All the characters exist to serve the plot, which is a nice change of pace from most anime in which the plot is shoehorned around only marginally entertaining characters. Story: You're seeing that right. Six hamhams. That's the whole lot. Everything in stock. The full monty. Perfect Blue has a plot that is equal parts disturbing, confusing, and terrifying. It manages this without being the least bit pretentious or self-serving. The story has more curves and twists than a pretzel factory yet remains as solid and polished as marble. Hope you like seafood! The most amazing thing about the plot of Perfect Blue is that the pacing style used is usually fatal to a story. Most good movies alternate between rising and falling action - build up some adrenaline in a heartpounding chase scene then catch your breath in a night club afterwards. Here, however, there's no alternating. The movie starts out slow and mild, then builds in intensity and doesn't let up. This kind of perpetual building plot usually fails because when a viewer is on the edge of his seat for that long, the climax is inevitably disappointing. In Perfect Blue however, the climax nails the rest of the movie firmly into place. When everything finally comes to a head and it's time to exhale, you realize that the conclusion was logical, exciting, and most definately worth an hour of nailbiting. Aside from the fact that she misses her old life in Cham, things go fine for Mima until her script calls for her to be the victim of a brutal rape scene. Her assistant Rumi objects even before Mima has a chance to, but it's too late to change the script now and, besides, all actresses have to make sacrifices right? So in one day of shooting, Mima manages to absolutely obliterate her image as a sweet innocent pop singer. Then strange things start occuring. Mima starts hallucinating. She's plagued by a ghostly image of her former self, the "real Mima", calling her filthy names and causing her to lose touch with everything around her. What's worse, she discovers an internet diary that is so personal and intimate it couldn't have possibly been written by anyone but her. When her innermost thoughts and feelings start turning up on the web, Mima snaps. She loses the ability to discern what's part of her TV show and what is reality. Her co-workers start washing up in the newspapers as victims of brutal stabbings. And her fish die. Normally I'd have no problem giving away the ending of a movie by using stylish spoiler text, but Perfect Blue's conclusion is too good to even mention in passing. It's one of those endings that makes perfect sense looking back on everything that's happened, but you'll never see coming unless some moron internet review guy has ruined it for you. Which brings me back to my original decision to not give it away, actually. Animation: Perfect Blue's visuals are a mixed bag. Even on DVD, things look grainy and washed out. Characters and settings alike tend to be somewhat undetailed, and the overall package comes off as malnourished. There would be no "self-proclaimed otaku" if anyone knew what a real otaku actually looks like. I'm probably being slightly unfair here. Much of the lackluster animation quality in the movie is probably due to the fact that everything on the screen is so mundane. I'm so used to seeing enormous fireballs or spaceship battles or ninety-foot-tall tentacle demons while watching anime that I totally forget what a normal fishtank looks like. Tokyo has honestly never looked so drab. Actually, the underwhelming nature of the visuals pay off. Because the things on the screen tend to be from a layman's concept of reality, when you get to the really fun stuff (read: full frontal nudity and/or violent attacks featuring a pizza box and an icepick) the impact is all the more noticable. There's blood spatter, but not crushing oceans of it. Only characters worthy of looking like perfect porcelain dolls get the "royal anime pinup" treatment - everyone else is fat and ugly just like real life. Mima doesn't even suffer from incomprehensible BCS (Blank Crotch Syndrome) in her au natural scenes. So in a strange way, the visual drawbacks of the film actually kind of work for it. Just goes to show, sometimes less is more. Culture Shock: Being the story of a pop culture vixen slowly spiraling into insanity, Perfect Blue tries not to confuse us poor Americans too much with mythology or green tea or cherry blossoms. In fact, a home-brewn take on this exact same story probably wouldn't look too much different (though I doubt you'd ever catch Brittany Spears or J-Lo trading in their headsets and gootchie hotpants for big red ribbons and Barbie tu-tus). It's probably worth noting that Perfect Blue was originally pitched as a live action film. Similarities can easily be drawn between here and, say, Fight Club or The Shining (the Jack Nicholson version thank you very much) - it's movies like that which show how a little bit of clever cinematography can make a movie feel fractured and at the same time claustrophobic. Of course there's no cinematography involved in an animated film... which begs the question: why don't we see more flicks like Perfect Blue? Cartoons lend themselves perfectly to this sort of thing. Drawn characters already have a nice heavy layer of suspension of disbelief. Just two crazy kids lost in a world full of umbrellas. Bonus hamhams for the movie's creators coming right out and admitting that they set out to abolish the humdrummery of typical anime. Perfect Blue was supposed to be something new and creative - tell a great story without giant mechs or giant guns or giant demons or giant boobs. (Yes! These guys are my heros!) However, I'm afraid I still had to fault the movie for its incredible umbrella population, J-pop opening sequence, and use of the word "fanzine". I didn't know it when I started AA last June, but Perfect Blue is exactly what I was looking for. I know anime like this exists and I know it's fantastic, and it is very disheartening to have found a solitary copy on a shelf amidst a torrent of same ol' same ol'. I know I've deviated from my ideals somewhat with reviews like Read or Die or Inuyasha, both of which are perfectly standard anime that I just happen to enjoy. Rest assured Perfect Blue is a different animal entirely: it's a movie that anyone who likes good psycho stream-of-consciousness quasi-horror flick will dig. So I'm officially firing off the celebration flares. It's taken fourteen reviews to do it, but I've finally managed to find some anime that (A) I had no idea existed prior to watching, (B) completely and Links Perfect Blue.com Animenation Listing IMDB Listing A better review utterly shatters all previous incarnations of the genre to do something new and interesting, and (C) manages to be enjoyable and highly entertaining to boot. Perfect Blue is a nightmarish fairy tale that movie fans can enjoy. Regular ol' bums who can't tell kanji from katakana, couldn't care less about the war between subs and dubs, and think catgirls look ridiculous rather than sexy. As for me, well, two out of three ain't bad. I happen to like catgirls. Overall Rating:

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