Perfect Blue - 1997

 Closing loops, closing loops.

Aight, so my brother is in high school and I'm in either high school as well or middle school.  My mom lets us convert our garage into a "dude space" complete with couches, a dart board, TV, VCR, and video game systems.  Life is good.  We have a few friends over at various times and in one of those we watch Akira, in one of those we watch Perfect Blue.

Perfect Blue was the first film by Satoshi Kon, and man was it groundbreaking.  Controversial, huge, defining.  These are all words that we thought of in the late 90s early 2000s when we saw this thing.  It was a few years after Akira and the films of Studio Ghibli.  Later on in life I would get into those films of Ghibli, but for now I watched Perfect Blue, with maybe a Steel Reserve or a Michelob, and I thought, "whoa."

Mima Kirigoe is a pop idol of the three-girl band CHAM.  She is going to leave the group to become an actress, determined to try something new in her life.  At her last concert, we watch as one particularly obsessed fan gets in a fight to defend her after some people throw beer cans at the stage.  This super fan is obsessed with her and we later see that he's created his own website dedicated to her.  A website which somehow knows her innermost secrets and thoughts.  As she gets into acting and is exploited through that art, she begins to unravel and the website seems to take a dark turn.

Perfect Blue was indicative of the time, and overall is a grim psychological film.  It is built upon the fragmentation of reality, and when it all comes down to it, it is really about the fragile precipice which we all walk on.  Rewatching it now, I have to say I felt like it is a little incomplete.  Spoilers I guess.

We see this huge dramatic shift in Mima's character, and we never get a reason why.  We gather she is unhappy about her transition as well as the sexual exploitation she is subjected to, but there is never a single piece of dialogue or justifiable action taken around this.  Rather, she has a little hallucination that appears and disappears randomly, and is also never explained.  She basically takes a deep dive off the insanity pool from minute 20 or so an never recovers, with nary a reason why.

The vulgarity, style and the themes and tone are all amazing, I have problems with the actual story here though is what I'm trying to say.  It feels extremely style over substance, and it also feels like from that same minute I said (Minute 20) we as the audience are excluded from what actually happens in the movie.  What happens in this movie?  There's a few kills, all of which may or may not have happened.  There's the aforementioned exploitation, which may or may not have happened, there's the loss of sanity, which in the end may or may not have happened.  

Perfect Blue was great when I saw it, and it pushed the entire world of anime into a different hemisphere.  It opened up anime for adults instead of kids, this along with Akira really furthered the genre.  It's not bad by any means, but I will say I was surprised at the plot holes and the insane logic leaps one is asked to take while watching this.  Overall, I love this movie and I always will, I'm just sayin, is all, I'm just sayin....