Japan, 1997
81m
35mm film, colour, 1.85:1
Dolby, Japanese
A Japanese animated horror film directed by Satoshi Kon.
Plot Summary
Pop singer turned actress Mima suffers a breakdown as she is stalked by a potentiall dangerous obsessed.
Credits
Crew
Directed by: Satoshi Kon
Madhouse, Rex Entertainment
Executive Producers: Yûichi Tsurumi, Ken Washiya, Kôshirô Kanda
English Language Version Executive Producers: Marvin Gleicher, Laurence Guinness
Produced by: Hiroaki Inoue, Masao Maruyama
English Language Version Produced by: Haruyo Kanesaku, Yutaka Maseba
Written by: Sadayuki Murai
Based on the Novel by: Yoshikazu Takeuchi
English Language Adaptation: Lia Sargent
Director of Photography: Hisao Shirai
Key Animators: Hideki Futamura, Nobumasa Shinkawa
Editor: Harutoshi Ogata
Music by: Masahiro Ikumi
Production Sound Mixer: Phil Brewster
Art Director: Nobutaka Ike
Cast
Junko Iwao (Mima Kirigoe)
Rika Matsumoto (Rumi)
Shinpachi Tsuji (Tadokoro)
Masaaki Ôkura (Uchida)
Yôsuke Akimoto (Tejima)
Yoku Shioya (Shibuya)
Hideyuki Hori (Sakuragi)
Emi Shinohara (Eri Ochiai)
Masashi Ebara (Murano)
Kiyoyuki Yanada (Kantoku)
Tôru Furusawa (Yada)
Shiho Niiyama (Rei)
Emiko Furukawa (Yukiko)
Aya Hara (Mima’s mother)
Shin’ichirô Miki (Taku)
Megumi Tano (child)
Akio Suyama (reader)
Osamu Hosoi (company employee)
Kôichi Tôchika (Red)
Emi Motoi (child)
English language version voices
Jimmy Theodore [real name: Stephen Apostolina] (Shibuya/Mimi fan)
David Lucas [real name: Steve Blum] (Mima fan/truck driver)
Robert Wicks [real name: Bob Buchholz] (Powertron/Mima fan/cameraman/actor)
Steve Bulen (Tejima)
Sam Strong [real name: Christopher Carroll] (news reporter/journalist)
Bambi Darro [real name: Dyanne DiRosario] (Yukiko)
Syd Fontana [real name: Sam Fontana] (additional voices)
Mima Kirigoe [real name: Bridget Hoffman] (Mima Kirigoe)
Bob Marx [real name: R. Martin Klein] (Mr Me-Mania)
Dari MacKenie [real name: Dari Lallou] (additional voices)
Wendee Lee (Rumi)
Dylan Tully [real name: Michael Lindsay] (Cham manager/Mima fan)
Devon Michaels [real name: Michael McCarty] (Mima fan)
Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (news reporter)
Richard Plantagenet [real name: Steve McGowan] (director)
Mattie Rando [real name: Randy McPherson] (additional voices)
Kermot Beachwood [real name: Matt K. Miller] (Mima fan)
Elliot Reynolds [real name: Richard Miro] (doctor)
Sven Nosgard (additional voices)
James Lyon [real name: Jamieson Price] (Murano)
Alternative Titles
Perfect Blue
Mau Xanh Ao Giac – Vietnam
Press
1999
Empire no.120 (June 1999) p.34
The buzz that sprung up around Japanese animation when Akira and a very few other amazing movies showed up in the West has dwindled somewhat, with video sell-through shelves groaning under the weight of repetitive, noisy anime about shrill gun-toting Lolitas, demon rapists and giant robot warriors. This striking picture is about as far as it’s possible to get from those conventions, pulling off the rare trick of telling a story worth doing in live action while managing visual effects only possible in the cartoon medium. […] Though it’s a neat woman-in-peril thriller, this is most striking as a look into the life of a Japanese media sensation, used up at the end of her teens, and squashed into a tiny apartment with her goldfish and too many ghosts. The film even goes so far as to expose the bizarre streak of paedophilia in Japanese pop culture, whereby it’s all right for a doll-like girl child to be a fantasy object but a sexual woman is shockingly transgressive. Perfect Blue is scary, funny, poignant and thoughtful, but also delivers thriller set-pieces that rank with the best of De Palma or Argento, marking director Satoshi Kon as a name to watch. – from an illustrated review (New films) by Kim Newman
Film Review June 1999 p.34
[D]espite an obvious desire to be daringly original, Perfect Blue never quite escapes the formulaic trappings of the sort of American TV movie we see every night at nine of Channel 5. It even has the obligatory creepy underground car park scene! Admittedly, Mima’s mental deterioration is the greatest point of interest and is cleverly handled. Ultimately, the character’s confusion is communicated just a little too convincingly to the audience who are left to guess whether what they are seeing is reality, Mima’s delusions, her stalker’s fantasy or just scenes from the soap opera. Although the script is a departure in theme for Japanese anime, the animation itself is very much on a par with more dated offerings such as Marine Boy and Battle for the Planets. The imagery is often inspired but is let down badly by the horribly jerky movements of the doe-eyed characters. Certainly never boring, Perfect Blue is an entertaining thriller with a good twist ending but just isn;t quite the ground-breaker that it aspires to be. – from an illustrated review by John Ainsworth
Shivers no.67 (July 1999) p.46
[T]he film is more than a psychological thriller and has much to say about the pitfalls of celebrity and the public image of the stars. […] The story becomes increasingly confusing as we lose grip on whether what we’re watching is real, a dream or a scenes from the television drama Mima is filming. […] Even when the killer is uncovered, the film’s conclusion leaves many questions unanswered and the final revelation leaves many loose ends untied. It is still not clear exactly what happened but this is in keeping with the tone of the film. The uncanny elements and the difference between imagination and reality are left for the audience to work out for themselves. – from an illustrated review by Josephine Botting
Sight & Sound vol.9 no.8 (August 1999) p.50
In narrative terms, Satoshi Kon’s anime doesn’t wholly make sense. The phantom Mima seems to be at once the ex-singer’s own psychic projection and someone else. But Perfect Blue has much to say about fame as an addiction for star and audience – a mutual dependency heightened these days by the internet. To know herself, Mima has to read her own diary as compiled by a psychotic fan. In essence, Perfect Blue is a traditional doppelganger nightmare. […] Satoshi and screenwriter Sadayuki Murai develop a complex structure for Mima’s psychosis, interleaving layers of the real with Mima’s dreams and the appropriately named show Double Bind. In one scene from the series, it seems that Mima’s character Yoko is suffering from multiple-personality disorder, and is convinced that she’s really Mima – a baffling moment soon revealed as only a provisional representation of Mima’s predicament. Elsewhere, the carpet is pulled from under our feet several times in quick succession. A traumatic scene proves to be a dream as Mima wakes, but that reality is collapsed in tum as Mima wakes yet again in a replay of the same scene – a brilliant use of the hallucinatory repetitiveness of commercial animation. The reality-dream divide is memorably worked out in the images. […] The execution becomes a complex metaphor for Mima’s reality, in which the everyday becomes a colour-drained place of exile from the pop universe. This dilemma is resolved in a bizarre conclusion, as Mima simply exchanges one kind of stardom for another: a career in soaps hardly seems the best way to get a purchase on reality. Even so, Perfect Blue is a delirious, culturally astute invention, and you can’t help thinking it would make instructive viewing for former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell. – from a review by Jonathan Romney
Variety 1 November 1999 p.88
Forsaking the usual anime fantasy terrain for a straight suspense plot that might easily have been executed in live-action form, director Satoshi Kon’s debut pic, Perfect Blue, is a psychological thriller that intrigues without quite hitting the bull’s-eye. […] Pic gets much more interesting once it develops beyond stock woman-in-peril situations to create a sort of pulp Pirandello thriller, as an increasingly disoriented Mima can no longer distinguish among reality, illusion and her TV dramatics. Though a climactic revelation falls well short of tying up various loose narrative ends, at least the trickier second half’s red herrings shift attention from the banal dialogue and scant character development. Animation is surprisingly routine, with the best work expended on some noirish night-time cityscapes. Though Perfect Blue, based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, ultimately disappoints with its just-middling tension and underdeveloped scenario, it still holds attention by trying something different for the genre. – from an illustrated review (Film reviews) by Dennis Harvey
Entertainment Weekly no.515 (3 December 1999) p.107
Pop idol Mima leaves her cutesy girl group to take up acting. One fan resents her racy TV image, and people start to die – but are the murders happening in real life, on the show, or in Mima’s paranoid dream life? Deciding is half the fun, as the barriers blur and the story loops and loops. The other half is simpy absorbing this beautifully drawn mirror house – and succumbing to its dark, dizzying effect. – from a video review (The week: animation) by Gillian Flynn
2000
Film Comment vol.36 no.2 (March/April 2000) p.78
The anime equivalent of a Dario Argento film […] The film pivots on its equation of two linked psychosexual pathologies – that of otaku (obsessive fan) culture and the condition of celebrity. Along the way, making pointed allusions to the paradigm of Jodie Foster, it suggests that the delusional states of fan and idol are complementary and interdependent. As with much anime, the protagonist is a squeaky-clean, desexualized innocent inhabiting a world that is graphic in more ways than one: sadistic violence and sexual exploitation are depicted with an emphatic, pulpy licentiousness (the murder of a sleazy photographer is particularly distinguished). The result is a pastiche quality, at once naive and distinctly pornographic. This, along with an increasingly Chinese box-like construction, reinforces the sense of pervasive dissociation. Mima’s grip on things is repeatedly suckerpunched by deadpan shifts between reality, dreams, or scenes from her TV debut – a psycho-thriller called “Double Bind” in which she plays a schizoid girl who believes she’s a pop idol. – from a review (Vidi vidi vidi) by Gavin Smith
References
Periodicals
- Empire no.120 (June 1999) p.34 – illustrated review (New films by Kim Newman)
- Entertainment Weekly no.515 (3 December 1999) p.107 – video review (The week: animation by Gillian Flynn)
- Fangoria no.185 (August 1999) p.60-63 – illustrated interview with Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue runs red by Caroline Vie)
- Fangoria no.194 (July 2000) p.74 – illustrated DVD review (DVD Dungeon by Michael Gingold and Matthew Kiernan)
- Film-Echo/Filmwoche no.26 (1 July 2000) p.48 – illustrated review (Perfect Blue by Reinhard Kleber)
- Film Comment vol.36 no.2 (March/April 2000) p.78 – review (Vidi vidi vidi by Gavin Smith)
- Le Film Français no.3025 (9 January 2004) p.12 – illustrated interview with Satoshi Kon (Entretien: Kon Satoshi by Patrick Caradec)
- Film Review June 1999 p.34 – illustrated review (Perfect Blue by John Ainsworth)
- Positif no.463 (September 1999) p.55-56 – illustrated review (Perfect Blue by G.C.)
- Premiere no.270 (September 1999) p.74 – illustrated review (Perfect Blue by G.D.)
- Shivers no.67 (July 1999) p.46 – illustrated review (by Josephine Botting)
- Sight & Sound vol.9 no.8 (August 1999) p.50 – credits, synopsis, review (by Jonathan Romney)
- Télérama no.2591 (8 September 1999) p.79 – review (Perfect Blue by B.G.)
- Variety 1 November 1999 p.88 – illustrated credits, synopsis, review (Film reviews by Dennis Harvey)
