Satoshi Kon (10/12/63 - Present)

• Began his career working with Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), and was heavily influenced by his style
• Made a series of films and television shows
  • Perfect Blue
  • Millenium Actress
  • Tokyo Godfathers
  • Paranoia Agent
• Explores themes that are not usual manga fare
  • dramatic
  • Book-based rather than manga-based
  • Homelessness
  • Realistic representation
• Quotes on Paprika
  • "It's not as if I had a goal in mind when I chose this type of hyper-real technique. Rather, I was hoping to create something that went beyond my imagination. I thought, "What would happen if we did this?" I wanted to surprise myself. It wasn't a plan I set up, but it resulted in something very strange and it gave me a lot of confidence in what I could achieve. As you say, the hyper-real method of creating reality is an "excessive reality." This is different from live-action filmmaking. It's a different kind of reality that challenges us what to emphasize or not emphasize. Each step will create a world beyond what is truly real. Instead of trying to create reality as it is around us, I felt that the surreal world would come out."  - interview with Midnight Eye, 11/20/2006
  • "What I wrote was that the internet and dreams share the same quality of giving rise to the repressed subconscious. I think in countries like Japan and America and other countries where internet is prevalent, people can anonymously seek or release things they can't speak of offline, as if there's a part of the subconscious that's uncontrollable and comes out on the internet. That is very much like dreams. This may be a very visualistic analogy, but I've always thought we drop down into dreams, and when you're sitting in front of your computer and connect to the internet, you're also going down into some kind of underworld. I've always thought those two images had something in common. I'm not trying to say that dreams and the internet are good or bad, I'm trying to saying that there's good and bad that cannot be judged in both worlds. Some people say that in the virtual world, different rules exist or try to say that a lot of vicious things happen there, but I don't think there's a reason to differentiate the virtual world from reality because reality includes that virtual world."

See also: Anime