パーフェクトブルー (Perfect Blue)

The same director developing one idea across a decade, which is worth an edge because the idea is the thing both films are known for. Perfect Blue works out the technique: a cut that lands in a different reality without warning, so the audience loses its footing at the same moment the protagonist does. Paprika does it continuously and at scale, and makes the mechanism literal rather than psychological. The subject carries over too: a woman split between a public persona and a private self, with the persona increasingly able to act on its own. Filed MEDIUM, as one artist's development rather than a debt to somebody else.

Kon's film is a Hitchcock construction in animation, and Vertigo is the specific one: a woman remade into an image somebody else needs her to be, and a watcher who cannot tell the woman from the image. The shared machinery is the double. Mima is haunted by the pop idol she stopped being, who appears to her as a separate person; Scottie rebuilds Judy into Madeleine and the film refuses to say which is real. Both end by making the audience complicit in preferring the constructed version. Filed MEDIUM: Kon named Hitchcock and De Palma as reference points for the thriller grammar without singling out this film.