This is a good anime movie but it can have weird moments if you are not fully use to Japanese or mature movies. For example we see Morio and Seijiro merge into one body while having too heads and in another Morio inappropriately touches Paparika when she is tied up and even puts his hand right through her jeans, up her shirt and rips off her face to reveal Atsuke on that side note she is seen naked and you might see her nipples and breasts. Although Paparika's origin was never revealed in this movie. I kept on wondering how did Atsuke gain the ability to change into Paprika. The music beautiful and memorable and the voice actors were good. This is definitely one of Cindy Robinsons good projects. If you want something mature in terms of anime movie I would recommend you check this out.

"Paprika" is a film that must have played better and seemed more unique back when it debuted back in 2006. This is because since then, a live-action film, "Inception", has come out and it's obviously strongly inspired by this Japanese anime. It's a film from the late Japanese director, Satoshi Kon, the same guy who brought us "Perfect Blue", "Tokyo Godfathers" and "Millennium Actress". And, like these other films, the plot is pretty weird and clearly not an anime that is intended for kids. "Paprika" has nudity, a weird plot and some violence that make it well worth seeing...for an older audience.The now familiar plot is about a stolen experimental device, the DC Mini. It's designed to allow psychotherapists to enter folks' dreams but a crazy guy is instead using it for ill. So, it's up to one of the therapists, Paprika, to enter folks dreams in order to stop the maniac.The animation is what you'd expect and the film quite good...albeit a bit confusing and very strange. It's really hard to describe and the best way to know more is just to watch this one.

I watched this film with my mother this evening when she said she'd recorded it for me on her Virgin Plus box whilst it was showing on Film Four this February. When I looked this up right here on IMDb, I liked its concept of dream analysis and I saw that this was directed by the same person as 'Perfect Blue' (which I found preferable and easier to follow yet more intense than this one), the late Satoshi Kon. Whilst watching this, I was impressed with the colourful visuals if they were bizarre but I found the story weird, weird, weird and so hard to follow that my mum had to pause the film to explain its story to me.As one reviewer had already observed, the animation is quite choppy and in my opinion it wasn't as good as the animation in 'Perfect Blue' let alone that in Studio Ghibli films. On a more positive note the human character designs differ from those in Studio Ghibli films but they are well-shaded, the rest of the characters are designed in a surreal manner and the backgrounds are a mixed bag - sometimes they looked realistic and at other times they looked as if they were rendered using cheap CGI. Both the editing and the soundtrack are decent if repetitive in places although I did like one piece of music that had dramatic choral vocals. I watched the original Japanese dub of this with English subtitles and while I didn't understand most of the spoken dialogue, some words were spoken in English (such as DC Mini - the dream-analysing device) and I found the subtitles very helpful. Although my mum laughed at this film more than I did, the funniest part for me was when Paprika's name was mentioned in a spice joke during the climax in which dreams and reality combine. While most of the characters are pretty bland and indescribable, I found Tokita a stereotype of an obese person by ordering a lot of food at one point while Chiba/Paprika and Himuro are convincing masters of disguise. The pace was mostly slow and the ending was abrupt and slightly disappointing.Overall this doesn't live up to the standards of Kon's earlier work 'Perfect Blue' or Studio Ghibli's output and the story was hard to get the gist of but the visuals were vibrant and surreal yet stunning. 7.5/10.

Do we want our dreams to become our reality? Is our dreams the answer or the question to that reality? How does our dreams shape how we see our self's in real life? This is just a few "little" questions that Paprika manages to raise in its explosive 90 minutes screen time. The creative power and sheer imagination which it portrays during this time is indeed impressive. Combine that with themes of life and death, love, dreams, technology etc. and it's still manages to be enjoyably encompassing. It's really science fiction at its best!Of course this isn't news for fans of the late Satoshi Kon, who has showed us a new side of our self's with each new film he has created. The psychology of dreams has been pretty much in all of his film and each time with an new angle for us to consider. While his other films has touched upon the subject of memories more than dreams, I feel both has been present throughout and that dreams got the spotlight this time.I rated this film the lowest of all of his films, but still I gave an 8/10, which isn't low by any stretch of the imagination. What I felt was different in this film and what I felt had diminished was the focus on the characters over the ideas. In this film the characters took a backseat to what ideas he wanted to put up front. I felt that the characters suffered somewhat to the spectacle of the incredible animation which took over more and more. His other films had it the other way around and felt more personal in nature, they emphasized the drama/thriller aspect of the story. Here the science fiction takes over towards the third act, and the film becomes a much more abstract conversation with the viewer instead of an emotional understanding.Still, a really great film that's gorgeous to look at, and one of the few films that really captures the absolute chaos of fantasy in dreams. Films like these are probably the closest we will come for some time, to the technology of sharing dreams as portrayed in this movie. Might be a good thing after all, as we just got mature enough to go see "Dreaming Kids".