Review of Perfect Blue

Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller about a singer in a pop trio, Mima, who turns to acting because of the lack of successes that she feels she is achieving in music. Ironically, after she leaves her former singing partners become far more successful as a duo than they have ever been working with her. As Mima turns towards acting, she discovers that a stalker has been making posts about her on his fan-page detailing Mima's day-to day experience as she transitions to acting. These things began to manifest themselves in Mima's mind and embody a separate personality that haunts her throughout this film. I am not usually drawn to anime but this film really poked at my curiosity. Mostly because of the stories I have heard about the esteemed director, Darren Aronofsky, buying the rights to this film for $60k in order to, not only replicate a seen from this film in his critically-acclaimed masterpiece, Requiem for a Dream, but also to allegedly replicate aspects of Perfect Blue in his Oscar-winning movie, Black Swan. At first, I was kind of confused about why he did this. But after watching Perfect Blue, I can kind of see why. This film is one of the most intense and disorienting films that I have seen in a while. So it's understandable that a director trying to achieve the same unique effect would try to mimic this movie. We see Mima's alternative personality, 'pop-star Mima', eat this woman inside-out. Mima moves toward more smutty and gritty content in her new acting career. She is playing a girl that gets raped in the new television series she has been cast in, she is letting a photographer take nude photos of her, and she is slowly retreating into more and more into her own mind while doing so. All while her former co-stars are gaining success without her. This causes this her stalker and her alternative personality that is manifesting her consciousness to become more invasive and violent. This film, at times, allows us to feel the same sort of disorientation and confusion that Mima is feeling, especially with the twist ending that leaves you thinking about this film long after it is finished. There is a portion of the movie where Mima keeps waking up from a sleep after each scene, as to suggest that everything that happened before was just a dream. This sequence left me so confused and the pacing made me so dizzy that I thought I was going to fall out of my seat. There are a lot of scenes in this film where you start to question what is real and what isn't. Perfect Blue is stylistically unsettling and memorizing, but still beautifully animated and edited. The film's score is unnerving. The English-dubbed vocal-performances don't sound out-of-place or corny like they do in most anime. I like how mature this film is. It intensifies until the very end without trying to break the tension with any humor or explain things to the audience. It is a dark look into the psychological darkness of being a pawn in the world of pop- culture. I hope to find some more anime like this in the future. I think that this film is a good stepping stone for anyone who is trying to get into anime. If you are trying to watch something that may keep you up at night, if you are trying to watch something that is thought provoking, if you like films with a complex plot and storyline watch this film. You won't regret it.