1.Prologue
On August 24th, 2010, the anime director Kon Satoshi passed away of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. Even at that point his legacy of work—four feature films and one TV series—was so highly regarded that movie fans and film scholars around the world mourned him as one of Japan’s great filmmakers.
Kon is remembered for films that blurred the line between reality and dreams and reality and imagination. Not only did he tackle such heady themes in his work, he portrayed them on screen through a unique visual language that he developed through distinctive editing and storytelling techniques. His first film, 1998’s Perfect Blue, put him on the map and is considered a masterpiece.
In many ways, Perfect Blue primed Hollywood for the arrival of films like Fight Club and The Matrix—films from around 2000 onwards that boldly explored the territory between reality and dreams. Up until that point, films that dared to ask questions like “What is reality?" had largely been shunned by the general moviegoing public as too difficult or bizarre.
The influence of Perfect Blue can especially be seen in films like Darren Aronofsky’s psychological drama Requiem for a Dream.
In 2001, Kon sat down for a conversation with Aronofsky, who was visiting Japan to promote Requiem. He reflects on the encounter on his blog. Aronofsky’s film includes a number of shots that evoke—or directly copy—scenes from Perfect Blue, such as an overhead shot of a character hunched over in a bathtub, or the use of a red dress as a motif. In their conversation, Kon says to Aronofsky, “I noticed there were some scenes that I felt as if I’d seen somewhere before, and I felt a little awkward watching it.” Aronofsky replies, “That was an homage.” Aronofsky had been such a fan of Perfect Blue that he even bought the rights to a live-action adaptation, which he ended up never producing, although he did direct a film that was remarkably similar: 2010’s Black Swan.
Director Christopher Nolan’s 2012 sci-fi masterpiece Inception is also heavily inspired by Kon’s 2006 film Paprika, which is itself an adaptation of a sci-fi novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka. Both films are centered on a device that allows the user to enter someone’s dreams, and both feature a scene where a character reaches out only for the dream world to shatter like a mirror, as well as a chase where a character runs down a hotel hallway only to have the world warp around them.
From the 2000s onwards, Hollywood has released many films about the intersection between reality and unreality, and Kon’s films forged a path—and a visual language—for exploring such themes. In this article we will look at Kon Satoshi, as well as one of his contemporaries, Hosoda Mamoru. Hosoda also released a film based on a Tsutsui Yasutaka novel, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, from the same production company that Kon belonged to no less.
2.Kon Satoshi: One of Anime’s Most Distinctive Filmmakers
Kon Satoshi was born in Sapporo, Japan’s northernmost island, in 1958. His brother, Kon Tsuyoshi is a guitarist who made a name for himself on the Japanese jazz fusion scene in the 70s and 80s and continues to work as a touring and session musician for artists such as Inoue Yousui, Utada Hikaru, and Fukuyama Masaharu. (Intriguingly, there are numerous examples of high-profile brothers who are both engaged in creative endeavors, such as manga artist Tsunoda Jiro and drummer Tsunoda☆Hiro, author Kikuchi Hideyuki and jazz musician Kikuchi Naruyoshi. Christopher and Jonathan Nolan are another example.) Kon spent his childhood going back and forth between Sapporo and Kushiro City due to his father’s work. When he later moved to Tokyo for college, the immense divide between rural Hokkaido life and Tokyo life would drive his interest in exploring reality and imagination.
Kon was into anime such as Heidi, Girl of the Alps, Space Battleship Yamato, and Mobile Suit Gundam from a young age. His favorite manga was Otomo Katsuhiro’s Doumu. He was also an avid reader of experimental sci-fi fiction by authors like the aforementioned Tsutsui and Philip K. Dick. After enrolling in Musashino Art University, he studied design and also immersed himself in foreign films.
Kon submitted his first manga, Toriko, to Kodansha’s manga anthology Weekly Young Magazine, and won the Chiba Tetsuya Award for Best Newcomer. His idol, Otomo Katsuhiro, was simultaneously publishing his seminal series Akira in the same magazine, and Kon would begin to work as Otomo’s assistant. After graduating from college, Kon would continue to work with Otomo, and his first experience working on an anime would be on 1991’s Roujin Z. Later, he worked on Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor 2: The Movie, after which he would decide to set down his manga artist cap and focus on anime.
Kon made his directorial debut with Perfect Blue, which was based on a novel of the same name by Takeuchi Yoshikazu. He then released two films that were more sentimental than his psychological thriller debut: Millennium Actress in 2002, and Tokyo Godfathers in 2003. In 2006, he brought Tsutsui Yasutaka’s Paprika to the screen, which ended up being his final feature film. Although Kon is not a household name in his native Japan, all four of his films were screened at international film festivals and won numerous awards. All are worth a watch.
●Kon Satoshi Picks
3.Hosoda Mamoru: Grounding Anime in Contemporary Japan
As soon as Hosoda Mamoru broke through with his 2006 film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, anime fans began touting him as one of the leading figures of the next generation of anime filmmakers to take up the mantle from larger-than-life figures like Miyazaki Hayao and Oshii Mamoru.
Hosoda was born in Toyama Prefecture in 1967. He became interested in working in anime after watching Galaxy Express 999 and The Castle of Cagliostro in middle school, and he began producing his own animated shorts, which he would screen at school events. At Kanazawa College of Art he studied contemporary art and live-action filmmaking, and he joined a filmmaking club where he produced his a series of art films.
After graduating, he applied for a job at Studio Ghibli but was ultimately rejected in the final stage of consideration. Miyazaki sent him a personal letter, explaining, “If we were to accept someone like you, I fear the experience would have the affect of dulling your talent. That’s why we’ve rejected you." Hosoda ended up joining Toei Animation. Several years later, he directed the feature-length Digimon Adventure: Our War Game!, and the film’s international success would catch the eye of Ghibli producer Suzuki Toshio. Suzuki approached Hosoda about coming on board to direct Howl’s Moving Castle. Unfortunately, creative differences led to Hosoda being dropped from the film only a few months in, and he feared that his filmmaking career was over.
Perhaps it was never meant to be; Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli produce fantasy films for children set in vaguely European settings, while Hosoda’s worldview is more grounded in modern Japanese urban and rural life. Moreover, throughout most of his career Miyazaki has remained steadfast in his preference for traditional hand-drawn animation. While Hosoda is one of the few remaining Japanese anime directors to carry on that tradition, his work also involves careful, deliberate use of CGI to bring environments to life. In the end, Hosoda was likely derailed by the divide between his dream vision of Ghibli and the production realities of a beloved national animation house.
After leaving Toei, Hosoda began producing work for animation studio Madhouse, the same studio that produced Kon Satoshi’s films. It was during this period that Hosoda produced his breakout hit, 2006’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and his 2009 follow-up, Summer Wars (2009). The latter is essentially a remake of his earlier film Digimon Adventure: Our War Game!, albeit moved to a rural Japanese setting and heavily influenced by his own personal experiences meeting his wife’s extended family. It won Hosoda the Japan Academy Film Prize for Animation of the Year.
In 2011, Hosoda founded his own production company, Studio Chizu. He released Wolf Children in 2012, and The Boy and the Beast in 2015. In 2018 he released Mirai, which premiered at Directors’ Fortnight, an independent section held alongside the Cannes Film Festival, and went on to be nominated for the Golden Globe Award for best animated film.
Hosoda is known for making heartwarming original stories based on his own life. Summer Wars was inspired by his first time meeting his wife’s extended family, while Wolf Children was his attempt to honor the challenges his own mother had to face. Mirai was inspired by a dream his young son had. Hosoda’s films are fantastical in nature, but they are also grounded in contemporary Japanese life and based on his personal experiences.
●Hosoda Mamoru Picks
4.Commonalities Between Kon Satoshi and Hosoda Mamoru
Both Kon Satoshi and Hosoda Mamoru released career-defining films in 2006 from the same animation studio, but the two directors are rarely mentioned in the same conversation. It’s true that Kon made complicated, nuanced anime intended for adults while Hosoda makes more straightforward anime for kids and young adults. Kon, as a master of the psychological thriller, is in many ways closer in spirit to a director like David Lynch than he is to his compatriots; Hosoda has a distinctive aesthetic—and an obsession with blue skies—but is clearly adjacent to filmmakers like Miyazaki. But Kon and Hosoda share a number of commonalities.
For example, both of them produce high concept films, whose premises can be stated in a single sentence. Paprika asks “What would happen if a device were invented that allowed us to enter the dreams of others?" The Girl Who Leapt Through Time asks, “What would a Japanese high school girl do if she was suddenly given the power to time travel?" Meanwhile, filmmakers like Miyazaki, Takahata Isao, Oshii Mamoru and Anno Hideaki make low concept films that focus more on character development and setting. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Hosoda was not a good fit for the Ghibli brand.
Both Kon and Hosoda are also interested in the intersection of reality and unreality, the past and the future, the real world and the virtual world, others and ourselves, the private and the public. Kon deliberately blurs the line between reality and dreams through the way he frames and edits his films. Hosoda excels in bringing extraordinary or fantastical elements into worlds based in reality. While it’s true that the directors do this to different ends—Kon warns about the dangers of becoming too engrossed in the fantasy/virtual world, while Hosoda’s works are lighter, gentler—both of them capture how reality and unreality are not at two ends of the spectrum. Rather, they are right next to each other, and overlap in unexpected ways. This is central to the Japanese aesthetic and spirituality found in literary works like Koizumi Yakumo’s Kwaidan and Yanagita Kunio’s The Legends of Tono. Long ago, the Japanese believed the boundary between this world and the next was rather fluid, and they were in tune to the presence of spirits in the nature around them. In that respect, both Kon and Hosoda are very “Japanese" filmmakers.
Kon and Hosoda also depict strong women in their anime, albeit in differing ways. In films like Perfect Blue and Paprika, Kon first presents a girl that encapsulates the Japanese “idol" aesthetic—cute, bewitching products of the male gaze—but as the story progresses a different side reveals itself—one that is fed up with portraying the narrow feminine ideal that Japanese society demands of them. Kon is commenting on the fact that so much of anime is drawn and produced through the male gaze, for a largely male audience. Hosoda, on the other hand, bases his female characters on the women in his life—his mother, or his wife, for example. That means they usually end up embodying the ideal Japanese woman in the minds of herbivore men and their brethren: older, more experienced women who are always smiling, unwavering in their loyalty, and more than happy to offer unconditional love. These female characters are basically Japan’s version of the manic pixie dream girl.
Finally, it’s interesting to note that while both Kon and Hosoda work in sci-fi—or are at least sci-fi adjacent—their aesthetic is firmly grounded in Japanese folk traditions. In Kon’s work this is most easily observed in the endless and unstoppable parade of maneki neko, frogs, Shigaraki tanuki and traditional dolls that wreak havoc in Paprika. Meanwhile, Hosoda lovingly captures quintessentially Japanese landscapes and cityscapes, and his stories often involve anthropomorphized animals, evoking Japanese folk legends. Intriguingly, human characters in his films are often drawn without a shadow—a technique used in Ukiyo-e and old picture scrolls. In terms of attention to indigenous Japanese imagery, the animator Shinkai Makoto follows in the footsteps of Kon and Hosoda.
5.Epilogue
The other thing about the films of Kon Satoshi and Hosoda Mamoru is that they both take a very Japanese approach to sci-fi; they are largely uninterested in exploring or explaining the mechanics of the technology or phenomenon at the center of their stories. Sci-fi stories in the West often find it necessary to spend time giving an explanation for extraordinary or futuristic elements, grounding them however remotely in a reality that we can accept as plausible.
In Paprika, Kon spends very little time in explaining the science behind the devices that are used to enter patients’ minds. Part way through the film, it comes to light that characters are able to enter the dreams of patients even when they are awake and not wearing the device. Later, the boundary between dreams and reality comes crashing down, allowing the aforementioned parade of Japanese folk symbols to encroach upon reality. At no point is Kon interested in rationalizing these turns of events. Meanwhile, Christopher Nolan dedicates entire scenes to explaining how different dream levels work in Inception. There is even a character who plays the role of an architect.
In Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the main character gains the power to time travel after she accidentally falls onto a device in the form of a walnut. It is also never really explained why she needs to get a running start and leap into the air whenever she wants to activate her powers. In his latest film, Mirai, it is never made clear whether the central character’s extraordinary experiences are all just a part of his imagination, or if they actually occurred in “reality". To put it more accurately, these things are beside the point for the filmmaker. But many Western viewers can’t help but scrutinize the film’s logic.
There was one thing about Mirai that surprised me. The film’s protagonist is a four-year-old boy who begins to feel left out after the birth of his sister. Over the course of the film, he learns that he is not the center of the universe, and he comes to embrace his role as the older brother. In essence, a four-year-old is forced through circumstance to learn an important life lesson. This struck me because so many Japanese films are about the sanctity of childhood. These days, adults in Japan seem to rarely ever discipline their children both in public and in private, preferring to let them roam free and wreak havoc because “that’s what kids do". Yet Mirai takes a firmly Western, more proactive approach to child rearing. That might explain the film’s rather mixed reception here in Japan.
