‘Nobody cares for you anymore. You’re tarnished and you’re filthy…’
Having watched and enjoyed two classic Anime films this week (Akira and now Perfect Blue), I have concluded that while I can admire the craft of anime, I’m not sure it’s for me generally. I find the combination of intense adult human emotion and animated cinema to be a jarring one, and I fear that this is something that I cannot overcome. That being said, there were moments within Perfect Blue that I found to be genuinely powerful…
Mima is a J-pop idol who decides to leave the world of music to become an actor. Many of her fans are upset by this decision, particularly Me-Mania, an obsessive and grotesque superfan who keeps showing up in Mima’s life long after she has left music behind. As Mima is repeatedly demeaned and degraded, her mental health begins to spiral out of control.
What I found most striking about Perfect Blue is how influential it has been. Darren Aronofsky directly paid homage to the film in Requiem for a Dream and then basically made his own version with Black Swan. I don’t know whether David Lynch was aware of Perfect Blue but the film shares more than a little DNA with Mulholland Drive, while the body horror here (truly horrifying as it is) resembles the work of David Cronenberg. As with Akira, the barrier for me here is anime itself as a medium. Psychological horror and animation don’t make for easy bedfellows, so again, this was a film that I admired rather than enjoyed.
Perfect Blue examines voyeurism, the male gaze and the patriarchy in general. There is no doubt that it is both influential and sadly prescient, but I can’t imagine myself revisiting it any time soon.
