Perfect Blue

After a perky final performance, budding J-pop star Mima announces to fans she’ll be leaving music behind to chase her dream of becoming an actress. Soon, she’s hung up her squeaky-clean, girl-band persona in favour of starring in a grim TV drama at the behest of her agent. But to some of her fans, this gradual loss of innocence is a heinous betrayal. The backlash begins to manifest in strange phone calls and faxes, shadowy lurkers, and an online diary in which someone is documenting her every move.

In Perfect Blue, director Satoshi Kon has created a hard-hitting psychological thriller that just happens to be animated. Its powerful visual style is a far cry from kawaii, and its disorienting, splintering sensibility is said to have influenced Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan. Mima, whose name suggests both mimicry and mimesis, becomes increasingly unsure of her identity. She is portrayed in reflections, distorting angles and invasive close-ups, sequestered in frames and dazzled in the glare of the spotlight. Eventually, she is even haunted by a tittering apparition of her popstar alias, who dances against the backdrop of an oppressive concrete Tokyo.

Mima becomes trapped in this world of distorted reality, in which perception trumps truth, and she has no right to seek womanly agency above sexualised innocence. At the height of her troubles, lived moments repeat, rewind and dissolve into uncertainty, and the boundaries between her acting role and reality crumble. She is thoroughly passive, relying completely on others for affirmation, mainly men, who look on, discussing her as though she is a commodity. In today’s social media-reliant society, in which personas are cropped, filtered and otherwise masked to keep up appearances, Perfect Blue’s questions of selfhood, construct and celebrity hold more significance than ever before. [Kirsty Leckie-Palmer]