Parents' Guide to Paprika

Originally released in 2006 in Japan and 2007 in the United States and on many critics' top anime films of all-time lists, this anime classic is incredibly creative and innovative. But Paprika is also a difficult and challenging film that requires viewers to pay attention to everything packed inside its taut 90 minutes. The visuals are sumptuous, busy, and intricate, and the ideas played within the story are mind-bending and taken from the novel of the same name by author Yasutaka Tsutsui. As it has often been suggested, Christopher Nolan's Inception and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two films that seem to directly work off Tsutsui's ideas in his novel. And yet, despite Paprika's achievements, many viewers might very well find themselves disgusted by it, either from its at times seemingly cavalier attitude toward sexual assault or its too easy blending of "thought" realities, or because of how simply the film cleans up its ending. But for others, Paprika will be a thought-provoking, challenging, and fun thrill packed with imagery, symbolism, and play, rich with a full assortment of meaning to argue over.

Notwithstanding, at its heart, Paprika is still a mystery and then a thriller. And the characters at the center are deeply explorative and represent humanity as a people who struggle with who we want to be versus who we find ourselves to be in reality. While our dreams compel us and show us possibility, they can also strive to keep us in trauma, anxiety, and pain. Further, the film implicates technology and technological invention without full ethical consideration as potentially soul annihilating and at the very least dangerous to what makes human beings special, which in this case is the fact that we dream, individually, independently, and powerfully. While the prospect of being able to dream together and experience the dreams of other people is promising in terms of its psychotherapeutic capacities, this film suggests that our dreams might be better served, and might better serve us, as remaining uniquely specific to the individual.