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“Perfect Blue” Movie Review

In the past decade, America’s music and Hollywood scene have seen the breakdown of teen starlets and pop stars that have graduated from their early days of clean, G-rated stardom into an adulthood that put them at an impasse between the persona of a teeny bopper and the reality of adulthood and a need to move forward. It is a universal idea, seen in media industries all over the globe. It is the conflict of maturing, put under a spotlight. “Perfect Blue”, Satoshi Kon’s 1997 surrealist thriller animated film, is an exploration of this phenomena spliced into the world of the bizarre.

We follow Mima Kirigoe, a Japanese pop idol leaving her group, CHAM, to become an actress despite conflicting opinions from the people in her life. It is mainly Rumi, Mima’s manager, and Tadokoro, Mima’s office manager, who have conflicting positions on where her career should go. At her final performance with the band, a group of rowdy boys are confronted by a part-time security guard with a rather grotesque face, Uchida, that attempts to get them to leave by force. The confrontation ends in the entire crowd harassing the group of boys and Mima stopping the fight with her announcement. This violent act is the trigger for a series of events that grow more terrifying and escalate as Mima delves further and further into a more adult public persona.

As Mima is pushed by the pressures of the industry to leave behind her old persona, she discovers a website titled ‘Mima’s Room’, a fansite she believes to be set up by a fanatic of her prior, idol self. As her stress levels rise and her internal conflicts with the risqué expectations set by the script writer of the drama she is acting in, Double Blind, worsen, the lines of her reality begin to blur. Mima finds herself waking up and hearing the same news report two days in a row. Scenes she has acted in on the show fade into ‘real’ events that buzz out of being with the sound of an alarm clock. As her life starts to scramble and spin out of control with violence and crime tainting her once innocent life with blood, Mima starts to question: which is the real Mima?

Perfect Blue uses setting and cuts to present its themes and create a sense of disorientation in the viewer to keep them as out of touch with the truth as Mima is throughout the film. The set of the drama is where Mima and our loss of touch with reality heightens the most. It is the place where actors hold two personas at all times and the reality of the characters they play steps forward and takes center stage as their true selves step back into the shadows. But, for Mima, the story she must participate in for the drama and the story unfolding in her life are sailing side by side and soon they seem to be one in the same.

In a scene where Mima is seen talking to the psychiatrist of the drama’s plot in what we assume is a scene, we see her identify herself as Mima, a pop idol, which she soon corrects with ‘No, I mean, an actress’. The psychiatrist leaves the room and consults the detective, telling him that she has disassociative identity disorder and that the murders that have been occurring in the film so far are a result of an alternate persona. Immediately, the scene cuts to a repetition of the same situation, where Mima recants her lines, identifying herself as her role in the drama this time, and the scene unfolds again, this time as a take.

Animation is often associated with childishness, but in Perfect Blue, it is used to create a surrealist feeling to an otherwise mundane setting. Faces of people are exaggerated to show their inner natures. The limitations that are found in live action films that would hinder the creation of Mima’s delusions and disrupt the flow between scenes are avoided with the fluidity that an animated approach allows. The choice of animation and the style used in the film adds itself to the out of touch feeling the movie tries to invoke.

But, is this much surrealism effective in story telling? The scenes are difficult to follow. It is a complicated set up, filled with subtleties that can lose a viewer if they do not pay close attention. It is easy to get lost in the quick scene to scene cuts and the deliberately contradicting information we are given as we see the confusing world from Mima’s perspective and watch her lose her grasp on reality.

In the case of Perfect Blue, the answer is yes. The point of the story established by Kon and his team is not to solve the puzzle but to get the message. The point is to understand the pressures on this young woman, the difficulty of growing and changing in the public eye and the dangers of fan idolatry. When you juggle several identities, you don’t know where the true self lies anymore. The world is a whirlwind and you can’t remember what ‘you’ you have been where. Your realities cross over each other and stability is lost.

The story continues to twist and turn as murders continue and Mima’s own identity becomes more and more unclear. Satoshi Kon and his crew elaborately construct a truly troubling psychological horror, the first of the late, great director’s famous but few films and the landmark of his unique and fantastic surrealist style. I fully recommend this film to anyone looking for a truly complex exploration of the mind in conflict and the troubles of fame.