The Unfinished Dreams of Kon Satoshi

Shannon Li

Normandy Sherwood

ASPP-UT 2

8 Mar. 2022

The Unfinished Dreams of Kon Satoshi

“With my heart full of gratitude for everything good in the world, I’ll put down my pen. Now excuse me, I have to go” (Kon). These were the last words Kon Satoshi wrote on his deathbed. In May 2010, he went to the hospital due to physical discomfort and was found to have pancreatic cancer. In August of the same year, Kon Satoshi passed away at the age of 46 (Loo). He is a famous Japanese animation director who only directed six works in his lifetime. The last work Dream Machine was never finished because of his death. As he said in his last words, he always respects his artistic process and appreciates the team that helped him. He regrets that he can no longer finish work that was halfway done. Although the number of works is not large, he has truly achieved that every film is a rich stroke in film history. Each of his works has won many international awards and has been studied and imitated by later directors of various countries.

Different from Miyazaki’s warmth and Shinkai’s freshness, Kon Satoshi is keen to describe the pressures faced by urbanites in modern society and explore the connection between reality and fantasy. The plots of his films are is mostly based on dreams. Imaginative fantasy, magical editing, and nuanced details constitute his unforgettable personal style. Watching his films often brings a unique experience of wandering between reality and the dream. Kon Satoshi is a dream maker, as Kon Satoshi’s autobiography Kon’s Tone described himself. One of Kon Satoshi’s most magnificent works, Paprika, also talks about “dream” directly from “dream”. So, there is nothing wrong with interpreting Kon Satoshi’s creations from a dream perspective.

Perfect Blue is the first film directed by Kon Satoshi. To most people, this is not only Kon Satoshi’s debut work but a work that establishes his style and shows his genius. It can be said that the debut is the peak. The film is a story about the transformation of an idol singer into an actor. The protagonist, Mima, is a member of a J-pop group. She leaves the group and becomes an actress. But not all her fans are happy with this decision, which caused her to be being threatened and tracked by some crazy fans. After shooting a scene that Mima plays as a victim of rape, she becomes jumpy and can no longer distinguish reality and her actress life. Which is a sign of dissociative disorder. And after she becomes psycho, most of the actors, cameramen, writers in the rape scene get murdered. In fact, it is her agent, an actress who once failed, who is jealous of her beauty and success and wants to become Mima. That is the reason the agent killed the actors who raped Mima in the film. Perfect Blue is an animated film that combines suspense, thriller, and fantasy. The atmosphere of suspense and horror haunts the mind all the time, making the audience unable to guess what will happen in the next second, and can only get increasingly into it. The climax and the ending are even more striking. Fantasy and reality are depicted so close to each other.

Perfect Blue is a film about anxiety. Mima starts her collapse from the first time she left her comfort zone. The path of an actress is unknown and fully covered under the shadow. The pressure of the new job, questions, and disappointment of her fans, creates anxiety. Moreover, being an idol is an exposure of her personal. While the story happens in the age when the Internet just spread out, televisions, cameras, websites are all the extensions of the eyes. Therefore, Mima’s life is under Gaze. The relation between lookers and being looked at is multidimensional. Because not only her fans are looking, her movie fans, collaborators, everyone who pays attention to her, and even us, the audience of the movie Perfect Blue, have become her lookers. Mima is being placed under spotlights and cameras, under Gaze. These Gazes are the reason for anxiety, which is a feeling of unpleasure, danger. Anxiety is a lack of something, as Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst described: “Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss……with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo” (Lacan 273). Anxiety is a potential loss, which is an expectant dread. The fear of losing something in the expectation, which has not yet come true. In the case of Mima, the expectation is what she imagines others want her to be. Her agent wants her to be an actor, her fans want her to go back to be a singer. She does not know which is the best choice for them, but those are what she imagines they want her to be. She does not know if they will be satisfied in any situation. As Lacan said in his Seminar IX, “……anxiety is the sensation of the desire of the Other” (Lacan). Take a deeper look into Mima’s case, what she is facing is a concealed object of desire: the crazy fan. A crazy fan is a man who acts like a stalker. He is a Gazer yet hidden behind a curtain. Mima is not able to find him, but the existence of this stalker still creates a Gaze. In the process of generating anxiety, there must be an Other that the sensation is imagining. But now the stalker is in the darkness where Mima cannot see. Then the anxiety becomes even more because the target of sensation is lacking now. The Other is missing, but it is there. This unknown Other creates more options for suspicion, which leads to larger anxiety.

Kon Satoshi’s works focus on dreams, as Mima’s sensation of the unknown. The expectation is another form of a dream. Imagining what is possible is common throughout the sensation and expectation. Desire is another key term in his film. Another work Millennium Actress is an animated film, it is about an interview with an actor Chiyoko who is now retired and aged. The film focuses on the life and experience of Chiyoko from her childhood to her end of being an actor. At an immature age in middle school, she met a painter who is listed as wanted. She helped the painter to hide from the polices, and the painter gave her a key to thank her. She found herself in love with the painter, but the next morning, the painter is gone. The technique of storytelling in this film is a masterpiece, this film is well known for its title of “textbook of montage.” During the interview, the interviewers are interacting with Chiyoko and make the story structure messy and unrealistic. The interviewers join the recall of Chiyoko and become part of her memory. She starts to become an actor because she thinks that thought if she is famous, the painter will find her again. While Chiyoko is recalling her life, her experience as an actor and her seeking for the painter interweaves together into a dreamy story which let the audience unable to configure if the scene is she acting in the film or is her real life. At the end of the film, the director created an eight-minute-long montage, which became a legend in film history.

Chiyoko loves the painter. Her entire life as an actor is the process of finding the painter, and the reason she is so successful is that she puts her real emotion of demanding the painter into her acting. In her acting career, the person she loves in the film is not another actor’s character, but the painter. Even the painter never comes to find her, Chiyoko always believes that the painter is somewhere. Painter, in this case, is Chiyoko’s desire, but it is not something fixed, it is an Object a. “In Lacan’s seminars of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the evolving concept of the object (petit) a is viewed in the matheme of phantasy as the object of desire sought in the other…a deliberate departure from British Object Relations psychoanalysis” (Mary 26). In Perfect Blue, Mima’s anxiety is caused by the sensation of the desire of the Other. And the object that caused anxiety is Object a. It is also the object of desire. In the film Millennium Actress, Chiyoko wants to find the painter, the painter, in this case, is Chiyoko’s Object a. Object a is the fragments of the Real register. The Real register, according to Lacan, is firstly is a prelinguistic unspeakable world. Humans enter the Symbolic register through language, but the Real register is not possible to be fully symbolized, there must be something remaining. This remnant is Object a, it marks a location in the Real register where language is faulty. Language exposes its inconsistency. The symbolic movement must have a remnant. The painter Chiyoko wants to find is not there yet, but Chiyoko believes that there is a painter. She symbolized the sign of the painter into a Symbolic register, and the rest of what is not symbolic becomes the Object a.

In this case, Chiyoko expresses her desire to the painter in her acting, but in films she acts, there is no painter. The painter becomes a symbol of the painter, but no longer the real painter. However, in Chiyoko’s desire, she believes there is a painter, there must be. This painter is the remnant of symbolization. That is the object of desire, a frame of fantasy. Chiyoko pretends that the character she acts to love in the films is the real painter, thus, she connects the Real register and the Symbolic register together by dreaming about the painter. Dreaming about the painter makes Chiyoko away from knowing if the painter is still alive. This little bite of finding the unreal painter is a Jouissance, which is, pleasure. Chiyoko touches this Jouissance by attempting to get to her Object a, but the precondition is, the painter is alive. The death of the painter is the most brilliant design in the story of this film. Later when Chiyoko becomes a successful actor and gets married to a director that loves her, she found herself still searching for the painter. But now she is a wife, she is no longer suitable to love another man. And this is when she gets to know that the painter is dead even before she became an actor. After she got married and before she knows the painter is dead, she believes that the painter is the one who can bring her Jouissance since she found herself is trapped in a marriage.

Death breaks everything. Chiyoko’s Object a collapsed after she knows that the painter is dead. This de-symbolized the painter and makes the Object a collapse into the Real register. This traumatic experience required a compensatory pleasure to fulfill. If Chiyoko chooses to hide the trauma with compensatory pleasure, then she will need another Object a as a frame of fantasy to reach the pleasure, which caused the desire continuous infinitely. Because if this Object a collapses again, the cycle will continue. It is necessary to traverse the fantasy. Chiyoko understood there is nothing as a painter, the Object a is not in the Real register but only fragments. The painter is not there. Or to say, the painter as a symbol is not the painter himself, the painter in Chiyoko’s mind is not the real painter. Even say, there is nothing beyond fantasy, there will be nothing after she traverses the fantasy. But to emphasize, fantasy is a form of desire, not the object of desire. In Chiyoko’s case, the painter is the Object a, and her love for the painter is the fantasy that pushes her to find him. “To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorizes, is to cease positing that the Other has taken the ‘lost’ object of desire. It is to accept that this object is something posited by oneself to compensate for the experienced trauma of castration” (Sharpe). And Chiyoko succeeds at the end of her life. The film ends with a scene when the old Chiyoko lays over the bed in a hospital, the film cuts into a scene that young Chiyoko is laying in a rocket to space. Her words are: “After all, what I really love is the pursuit of him” (Millennium Actress 1:22:00). She accepts that there is no Object a that can satisfy her. There is no something superior. Fantasy is constructed by the subject’s desire. After she realized that the fantasy is constructed by her subjectivity, she found her fundamental fantasy, which is that she is the one who can construct the positivity that supports her to the end of her actor life.

As above, the ontological reflections that Kon Satoshi includes in his films are philosophically profound. When audiences watch his films, they are not only learning about the story, but empathizing with the story as a projection of themselves. This unique narrative connects Kon Satoshi’s films with the audience in the dimension of the fourth wall.

The characteristics of Kon Satoshi’s later narrative style are always focusing on the stories of a heroine, the confrontational power of the alien world, the reaction of each character, and each dramatic conflict. It all revolves around this heroine, in his work Paranoia Agent and Millennium Actress all shows this heroine style. This heroine is small and broad, and the story will be full of tension and absurdity, but it makes sense. Using subconscious descriptions, vague fantasy, and the distance from reality, to show the changes in the character’s heart. In Kon Satoshi’s film, his heroines are always suffering under a certain emotion. From all the analyses above, it is distinct that his characters are driven by their inner emotions instead of pushing by the plot. This storytelling that is character driven is extremely fascinating combine with Kon Satoshi’s editing style. He succeeds in presenting a character that is so similar to a real person who can be psychoanalyzed precisely. This realistic style in character rendition is influenced heavily by his early animation experience.

Katsuhiro Otomo is Kon Satoshi’s teacher. In other words, when Kon Satoshi had not yet become a director in his early years, Kon Satoshi first participated in the film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. The style of Katsuhiro Otomo’s creation is like the waves of the ocean, with undercurrents surging. So, Katsuhiro Otomo often takes the fate of humankind as the theme, reflecting on the relationship between human achievements and human beings themselves. He will discuss mostly topics like “Technology and power will eventually bring destruction.”

Katsuhiro Otomo is particularly interested in “Destruction”. In the movie Akira, Tokyo was destroyed twice, the world war was once, and the Akira energy rampage was once again. Since then, disaster scenes of “destruction” are common in his screenwriter and director’s works: the runaway elderly care machine in Old Man Z continuously absorbs and combines, and finally becomes a mechanical monster; in Metropolis, the robot heroine incarnates as a human weapon; In Steamboy, the steam city is finally destroyed. In short, the end of the movie must be “destroy the world”, and the depiction of disaster scenes increases the number of paintings and the workload of storytelling and leads to high production costs.

The root of the disaster is the misuse of technology. Katsuhiro Otomo’s work has a keen sense of “didactic”, which is derived from this. This is a recurring theme in his work. Katsuhiro Otomo’s attitude towards technology is overly complicated. On the one hand, he describes the impact of advanced technology on the world in his animation, which brings convenience to human beings; on the other hand, the story often ends with the negative effects of technology. From this perspective, Katsuhiro Otomo is quite vigilant about technology. Katsuhiro Otomo describes technology as a potential threat that might cause destruction. Kon Satoshi brings the idea of destruction into his work as a factor of suffering. In Kon Satoshi’s story, the protagonists are always unfree, they are suffering under a certain emotion. Compare to Katsuhiro Otomo’s direct showing the destructing city in screen, Kon Satoshi is focused on a slower destruction, a hardship in person.

Katsuhiro Otomo uses a rich and varied visual language in the film to highlight the contradiction between modern technology and human development - human beings will be backed up by the technological achievements they admire at any time. In addition, Katsuhiro Otomo also integrates Hollywood movies and cyberpunk culture to make a real wish for the social characteristics of the Japanese and promote the development of sci-fi realism animation to the peak.

Katsuhiro Otomo is meticulous about the performance of the realism of the picture. His pursuit of authenticity made the reflections on the glass of the building in Akira optically accurate. The richness and precision of detail in any one image change the style of Kon Satoshi with whom he works.

Kon Satoshi participated in the scripting of the first short film Her Memory in the animated short series Memorizu that Katsuhiro Otomo oversaw. Kon Satoshi also condenses his understanding of dreams, virtuality, and reality into this short thirty minutes. In it, Katsuhiro Otomo’s pursuit of truth has influenced Kon Satoshi deeply. But Kon Satoshi fuses real visuals with his peculiar penchant for “dreamland”.

Kon Satoshi’s work has influenced directors better known than him, such as Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky. Christopher Nolan’s well-known film Inception has several imitations of Kon Satoshi’s Paprika. The scenes including elevators, corridors, etc., and even the scenes where the heroine touches the mirror in the dream are the same. There are also many classic shots in Perfect Blue, which have been borrowed by many well-known directors, such as the scene where Mima is immersed in the bathtub is imitated by Requiem for a Dream. The conflict between actor Mima and idol Mima is imitated by Black Swan. When it came to Millennium Actress, Kon Satoshi’s storytelling talent was on full display. Millennium Actress not only has a lot of fanfic clips, but the heroine’s chase scene is even more beautiful. In a chase, the fast-paced editing blends the elongation of time and space, countless delicate transitions, and period drama-like silhouettes, and still can maintain the unhurried and exactly right breathing rate of the whole movie. Unfortunately, he as a dream builder can never finish his last dream before he left, the film Dream Machine. But still, his legacy of presenting dreams in such a realistic way inspired countless artists to step into the film and animation industry. His dream is unfinished, because all the artist he influenced are carrying it forward.

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Work Cited

Aronofsky, Darren. “Black Swan.” IMDb, 3 Feb. 2011, www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798.

Aronofsky, Darren. “Requiem for a Dream.” IMDb, 13 Sept. 2001, www.imdb.com/title/tt0180093.

Katsuhiro, Otomo. “Akira.” IMDb, 16 July 1988, www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625.

Katsuhiro, Otomo. “Metoroporisu.” IMDb, 26 May 2001, www.imdb.com/title/tt0293416.

Katsuhiro, Otomo. “Rojin Z.” IMDb, 14 Sept. 1991, www.imdb.com/title/tt0102812.

Katsuhiro, Otomo. “Steamboy.” IMDb, 17 July 2004, www.imdb.com/title/tt0348121.

Kon, Satoshi. Kon’s Tone. 復刊ドットコム, 1, Jan. 2013.

Kon, Satoshi. “Memorizu.” IMDb, 23 Dec. 1995, www.imdb.com/title/tt0113799.

Kon, Satoshi. “Millennium Actress.” IMDb, 14 Sept. 2002, www.imdb.com/title/tt0291350.

Kon, Satoshi. “Paprika.” IMDb, 25 Nov. 2006, www.imdb.com/title/tt0851578/.

Kon, Satoshi. “Paranoia Agent.” IMDb, 2 Feb. 2004, www.imdb.com/title/tt0433722.

Kon, Satoshi. “Perfect Blue.” IMDb, 28 Feb. 1998, www.imdb.com/title/tt0156887.

Kon, Satoshi. “Satoshi Kon’s Last Words.” Makiko Itoh, 26 Aug. 2010, makikoitoh.com/journal/satoshi-kons-last-words.

Lacan, Jacques. “Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real” (with W. Granoff), 1956. M. Balint (ed.), Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, New York: Random House, London: Tavistock. p. 273

Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: Norton, 19882015.

Loo, Egan. “Perfect Blue/Paprika Director Satoshi Kon Passes Away.” Anime News Network, 24 Aug. 2010, www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-08-24/award-winning-director-satoshi-kon-passes-away.

Mary, Jacobus. “The Poetics of Psychoanalysis”, (Oxford 2005). p. 26

Nolan, Christopher. “Inception.” IMDb, 16 July 2010, www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666.

Sharpe, Matthew. “Lacan, Jacques.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/