PERFECT BLUE

Satoshi Kon’s 1997 debut feature “Perfect Blue” stands unparalleled as a testament to the degree of fear, paranoia, and horror that able to be evoked in audiences by an animated film. “Perfect Blue” is a psychological thriller surrounding the life of Japanese pop-idol Mima as she transitions her career from being an idol in the music group Cham to being an actor on the popular crime show “Double Blind”. However, as Mima sacrifices more and more of her original

with her hallucinatory alter ego represent the developing resentment of obsessed Cham fans, such as those running “Mima’s Room” and her stalker (Uchida/Mimaniac). In juxtaposition to the scenes with Mima’s hallucination, the scenes in which Mima is Yoko demonstrate that she is genuinely having trouble distinguishing who she really is now that she has left Cham behind. This is exemplified by the character, Yoko, suffering from delusions of being a pop idol.

image to the salacious lifestyle demanded by

the acting industry, fans from her time as an idol become increasingly obsessed with Mima’s “tarnished” image and vow to fix it at any cost.

Eventually, Mima is required to participate in a scene that demands nudity; after this demand is made, writers and producers of “Double Blind”

begin to show up brutally murdered. With the

Like many of Satoshi Kon’s other works, “Perfect Blue” plays with the idea of a character’s duality, often represented as an independent and physically divergent manifestation of alternate

occurrence of these mysterious deaths, Mima begins to lose more and more of her understanding of who she is. Mima begins to question herself and her grasp on reality as she begins to fear

personalities.

Furthermore,

Kon

displays

that she may have committed the murders.

the inseparably intertwined reality of these manifestations (or rather, personas) through disorienting and seamlessly flowing scenes that switch perspectives from one persona to the other. These alternate personalities are represented in the film as Mima’s character on “Double Blind”, Yoko, as well as a recurring hallucination of Mima as a Cham member. Mima’s experiences as Yoko represent the reality of her life torn between her past as an idol and her future as an actress, as the character of Yoko is struggling with multiple-personality disorder.

However, shortly after shooting the scene, Mima realizes she is not behind the murders when her stalker Uchida/Mimaniac attempts to murder her. Having survived the attack, Mima wakes up in the house of her manager Rumi and realizes the truth behind all her fears. Mima, once awake, discovers that Rumi’s apartment is an exact replica of hers. Moreover, Mima sees that Rumi is wearing her Cham costume and is pretending to be Mima from when she was in Cham. She explains to Mima that she is the “true Mima”, and there can only be one.

Conversely, Mima’s recurring hallucination of

herself as a member of Cham represents her

“Perfect Blue” can be analyzed and explained

manager’s, fans’, and stalkers’ obsession with her

through

many

different

lenses,

the

most

image, as this hallucination often chastises and threatens Mima for her recent career choices.

surface-level of which being fan obsession. However, to posit that “Perfect Blue” is merely

a psychological thriller about fan obsession is a

Mima’s spiralling descent into paranoia is sparked by her discovery of a webpage called “Mima’s Room”, on which someone has been posting a forged, yet disturbingly accurate, journal of her daily life. As Mima pursues her career in acting, she is cast and written into increasingly racy scenes, and the frequency in which Mima encounters the hallucination of herself as a Cham member increases. These hallucinations become gross understatement, as the film is exponentially more. It addresses obsession with fame, image, and understanding of self. This film also addresses firsthand struggles with mental health and the physiological manifestations associated with them. Ultimately, “Perfect Blue” criticizes the inherently sexist and misogynistic structure of society and pop-media’s demands of women due to their obsession with controlling them.

more violent and angry as the episodes become

more and more frequent. Mima’s confrontations

THOUGHTS | ELI SAGNER