May 08, 2004
Perfect Blue
Perfect Blue is the 1997 Japanese anime about a pop singer who is
trying to make a career change and get into the movies. But there are
complications and her dreams become reality, or is it vice versa?
Mima Kirigoe is a member of the Japanes girl pop group, Cham, but she wants to make a change. She (and her handlers) is anxious to get into the movies, as an actress, and so announces her retirement as a pop star during a concert, and then starts acting in murder / mystery called Double Bind. This news is not accepted nicely by most of her fans; in particular, one deformed guy takes her change of heart very seriously.
As Mima gets further and further into the movie, her role expands. The screenwriter siezes the opportunity to take advantage of her former career and begins to intertwine her old reality with the movie; so much so, that even Mima starts to get confused, trying to figure out the blurry line between the movie and her life.
The disillusioned fan doesn't help. He runs a web site that claims to be "Mima's Room", and purportedly has a daily dairy of hers, all of which is created by him. Mima starts to get halluciinations, seeing a reincarnation of her prior self, once again performing with Cham, who are becoming very successful without her.
Suddenly, people involved with the movie begin getting killed in gruesome fashion, and her world gets even more topsy turvey. Her dreams, the movie, and "reality" all become intertwined, so that she is no longer sure where one ends and the other begins. More murder and mayhem follow, questions are answered and the solution revealed.
All in all, probably the best Anime movie I've seen. Most of the other ones, like Spirited Away and Akira, all hinge on some sort of strange metaphysical happenings. Perfect Blue is more or less a "normal" thriller, which is both good and bad. It's good in that it is an interesting story, with some tense moments. It's bad in that it is a cartoon and sort of hard to take serious, at least for me.
The animation isn't all that great, certainly not up to par with the latest of today. There are some nice effects, though, and the movie is easy to watch. I broke with my normal policy and watched the English dubbed version and it was pretty good. It certainly doesn't give your speaker system a real test, but the sound effects are solid and there some real creepy theme music. Extras on the DVD include a "Mima's Room" "website", which has some music outtakes and the like, and some interviews with the English voice actors.
So I'd say this is worth at least a rental. The story was good and the ending very plausible. They did a good job of mixing reality, dreams and the movie, although they nearly go over the line. Give it a try!
Buy Perfect Blue at DVDPlanet.com
Masaaki Okura, Shinpachi Tsuji, Rica Matsumoto, Junko Iwao
A psychological thiller about the unraveling of a girl named Mima as the life of a pop icon slowly erodes away Mima's sense of self. Posted by jdarnold at May 8, 2004 10:12 PM
