Perfect Blue

     The most transgressive film about town is Satoshi Kon's animated erotic thriller, Perfect Blue, oozing blood and violence and containing problematic rape sequences. But the movie is pretty exciting, imaginatively drawn stuff, an often startingly effective terror ride in which poor pop idol Mima "Kitty" Kirigoe is put through the ringer time and again after she leaves her cozy teen singing group and "graduates" to acting before the cameras in a deeply sexual murder mystery. As happens in these kind of paranoid, deranged tales, nightmare and reality, dreaming dreadful things and living them, jumble together. Are people really being stabbed to death? Is our "Kitty" the killer? Or is it a ghostly doppelganger, who looks like the singer Kitty, with a fixed cutesy smile and a Snow White dress? Roger Corman, a fan, has said of Perfect Blue, "If Alfred Hitchcock partnered with Walt Disney, they'd make a picture like this." This Japanese anime is dubbed superbly into English with, thankfully, no movie stars supplying their honey voices.

GERALD PEARY
(January, 2000)

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