#perfect blue analysis

In this post, I’m going to go over all the stuff that I’ve written about on Tumblr to see what episodes, games, TV shows and movies I’ve enjoyed and enjoyed writing about. I’m still learning because I’m not a professional critic or a journalist but a novelist. I started this as a means for a portfolio to build-up work and I couldn’t be bothered messing about with making a website because I’m not exactly tech-savvy. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to doing so much more. So much in fact, that I will have eventually written about everything ever.

Perfect Blue

I really loved Perfect Blue and I was very happy with what I wrote about it because it’s not exactly an easy film. I barely scratched the surface but I personally feel that it is one of those movies that isn’t really meant to be “got”. It has multiple layers and “reading too much into it” is a concept that the film itself makes comment on. The art allows you as a viewer to make what you think out of it and it’s a double-edged sword because at one end, it does mean that it’s an expertly crafted psychedelic, psychological thriller that achieves this mystery in the plot but on the other - in this modern age of post-grad, new-media analyses - people want to declare that their interpretation is exactly what the art is about. If you look up write-ups and reviews of Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, research is riddled with all sorts of angles on the ideas that the film presented which is great but it’s frustrating that ultimately no-one really knows for certain what was real and what isn’t and that is the point of the movie but no-one can really accept that. Everything has to have conclusions and I tried to avoid that as much as possible in my post but just to talk about themes.

Having said that though, if I was to re-do it again right now, it would probably be completely different. In short, I still love the movie and almost everything about it. I do think it is ever-so slightly overrated and overstated. To date, it’s my favourite animé movie. If you want to read it, it’s here. It’s a biggun, mind.

Re:ZERO / Starting Life in Another World from Zero

i’m ups and downs about Re:ZERO and I still am. It was exhausting to write about every single episode of this fucking show because you don’t expect the world to be so complicated because of the silly way that it begins. Writing about it was not like anything that I had ever done before and I was thrown in at the deep end but in a lot of ways, I thrived from the challenge. It was my first real foré into animé that was outside my jurisdiction, as it were. Compared to what Japanese media that I absorbed before (Danganronpa, Persona, A Silent Voice, Madoka Magica and Steins;Gate), it was pretty out-there. I was still new to animé (I still am) so it was a little overwhelming. I routinely got things wrong, confused one episode’s contents for anothers and spelled character’s names wrong. Not only was I ill-experienced with animé, I wasn’t terribly interested in medieval fantasy either. In fact, I hate medieval fantasy.

All that being said, I still enjoyed my time writing about it and embracing the challenge. I like that there is a lot that I can say about most episodes despite what I actually think about it. Even though I’ve wrote two summary write-ups about the both seasons, I still don’t really think that I’ve settled in my opinions about it. It is one of those things that is admittedly quite good but there is just that certain thing that you cannot put your finger on for the life of you that would just make it that bit better.

For brevity, my favourite episodes [to write about] were The Sound of Chains, The Outside of Madness and The Witches Tea Party. There were more good episodes but they were so good in fact, that it was too hard to write about them. I’m not Vonnegut, you know.

To Your Eternity

I really loved the first few episodes of To Your Eternity. I was blown away by the weirdness of the concept and how they executed it in a really larger-than-life way. Although that I’m having a tumultuous time with it at the moment, I still think the first six or seven episodes were really good at doing everything it is that you can think of and then some. It was great at storytelling, building mystery and suspense, drama and fight scenes. Fumetsu no Anata is an incredibly competent show and the universe outside of the brewery is something that I’d love to explore for myself. I’ve not been too invested in anything for a long time and I’m going to stick with it despite the problems I’ve had with it in recent weeks. I upload a To Your Eternity write-up every Tuesday after the newest episode has come out and Episode #11 came out yesterday on my blog.

My favourite episodes are The Rambunctious Girl, A Small Evolution and Those Who Follow. This has to be the asterisk that these are my favourite episodes so far. The series is far from being done.

INSIDE

I loved Bo Burnham’s INSIDE as did everyone else but I felt like my write-up could’ve been a lot better after sitting down to read what everyone else had to say about it and it was all far more clever, poetic and beautfiul compared to me. It’s probably why I pre-emptively prefaced it with the adverb Gushing to implicate senseless rambling by a blogging idiot who doesn’t know how to properly review a film or what to say about music. I still do enjoy it and I wish that I could sit and write four hours and be incredibly dissectant in how the piece is put together. But my dissertation is on the way and I don’t really have time to be surgical for fun.

My favourite songs were White Woman’s Instagram, Welcome to the Internet, Comedy, Problematic, Sexting and Goodbye.

Berserk

I very much loved writing about all of Berserk from the original and iconic animé to the much maligned 2016 iteration. After rejecting a lot of it initially, the more and more I think about it, it grew on me. I had to go back and rewatch everything once Kentaro Miura died and I discovered that I actually, genuinely loved Berserk and I don’t know what I was thinking. It was nice to write about something so certain and so plainly obvious. Like I said in the original article, I don’t know what else I can add. It was just a lot of fun to express how I felt about it if it was ever so brief.

Persona 4: The Animation

Persona 4: The Animation has been present in my life for what feels like forever and I was bound to write about it once I started doing this i-have-an-opinion-blog thing instead of concentrating on my novelist pursuit. It’s something that has stuck with me ever since I first seen it and to me, it was my first animé that I ever watched and could remember all the way through. But it had been a long time since then so I decided to sit down and watch through it all again to see how it would fair on my now slightly cynical brain.

Now,

it wasn’t as great as I remember BUT, I still had a good time watching it. I found new favourites in the series and new things to like about Persona generally. I also found new things to utterly loathe and despair at the sight of it in the 26 episodes. To be fair, some of those certain things that I now hate about it are things that I would hate in all animé and they are disappointingly common things that you aren’t allowed to express distaste for because “it’s just an animé thing” i.e. Treating women like property, making fun of gay men, trying to find comedy in borderline sexual assault ETC. At the risk of putting myself in front of the cannon of annoying patois and verbiage from the terminally reclusive, I have to say that all those tropes had soured my friendship with Persona 4: The Animation but not enough to break the bond completely. Now, P4 is that friend who crosses paths with a different friend group of yours one day nd you sit there clenching your knuckles until they’re snowball white because you're constantly worried that embarrassment or offense might be caused at any point. You know it’s capable of it but you just hope the charm shines through all the cringe.

My new favourite episode was The Anniversary to Become a Family which you can find my write-up of here.

This article will contain spoilers about the entirety of the movie Perfect Blue.

The movie and article features scenes that some viewers/readers might find distressing. Discretion is advised.

This film might genuinely be one of the best films I’ve ever seen but I’m terrified of doing this write-up because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do this film justice. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate writers, critics and journalists who exercise and overexaggerate how good or bad something is for any effect. I find it extremely grating whenever a film, game or TV show is so quick to be labelled a ‘masterpiece’ and the brains behind it are ‘geniuses’ by every Tom, Dick and Harry. HOWEVER, this film is indeed a masterpiece. Without further ado, here is my absolute best effort in writing about it. This movie is too good for us.

Perfect Blue is a film from 1997 based on the novel Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis written by Yoshikazu Takeuchi that follows a Pop Idol named Mima who is moving away from the musical industry to be an actress. I was thinking of the plot of Space Jam immediately but remember, I knew little-to-nothing about this movie. The throughline of this is that she is bound to recieve hate from the bizarre culture of expectations put upon Pop Idols in Japan because she is “turning her back” on her fans which this movie will make a terrifying premise out of. She is on set as an extra on what looks like The X-Files who has one line but whilst she is filming, a letter bomb blows up in her agents face leaving him on the ground covered in blood. A bolt from the blue really when you consider that the film up to this point is set-up like a coming-of-age type drama.

What is weird immediately is that she is told that Tadokoro, her agent, is going to be fine and not to worry which seems curious at best because his mangled body looked done for. At her quaint nice little apartment that is very “of the time” she opens a letter telling her to go to a website which she doesn’t get because it’s the late 90s and the internet isn’t something people thought much of. Her manager comes over to teach her how to get her head around a URL and you’re thinking “Aww, isn’t this cute and timely” because it’s like dialogue from Sailor Moon or something. She goes on the website and it is full of diary entries from her perspective that details seemingly impossibly accurate daily routines, thoughts and feelings from how she steps off a train, how she gets in the bath and most pivotal of all, what her line was in the show. Pivotal because that they did that one take in the studio and the assumption is that they all went home early because of the letterbomb incident.

So now you’re thinking that this is going to be some kind of whodunnit story about who the stalker is right? It could only be the creepy guy that they keep showing and cutting to in the background of scenes who actually stops someone throwing something at her at the beginning of the movie whilst she’s on stage. So you assume, the film will see out it’s logical conclusion of finding the perp, there might be an arbitrary bait-and-switch where it was sOmEoNe ElSe AlL aLoNg and then roll credits.

What happens now is that she is scheduled into a violent risqué scene (without saying it out loud) which her manager Rumi protests to but Mima accepts it as being part and parcel of being in the acting fraternity so the scene itself actually goes on for an uncomfortable amount of time but what is equally as uncomfortable is that it isn’t really made explicitly clear what this is scene is a part of because it seems out-of-place for the white-tiled, crystal glass detective show. You’re left questioning as a viewer what this is really all about and that’s a good thing. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’re about to find out why that’s important.

She goes home to her apartment to find her fish are dead and that her former pop idol self tells her that she is disgusting for doing what she did which is more of a reflection as to what her fans think of her than what she thinks of her. It should be noted at this point that she continuously sees her reflections in windows where she is dressed up in her frilly pop idol get-up. This is where the film blossoms into something incredible because the commentary on imposter syndrome inflicted on celebrity and how the consumer entitlement factor is raised through unreasonable levels is still relevant today. Mima has a huge freakout in her room and destroys everything and admits that she did something wrong but in the next scene, everything in the room is back to normal.

These sorts of incidents begin to occur constantly from hereon out to the point where you are confused as to what is real and what isn’t because of the impossibility and/or implausability factors. What this film does startlingly well is tricking the viewer into thinking a scene is actually happening before revealing it just to be Mima acting in the sci-fi show thats interestingly called “Double Bind”. Later, it even goes as far to engage in cinematic cheating where the background will be shown to have no film set there before there being one in the next which is a blatant move to fuck with the viewer. Because the agent moves to have Mima appear in the show more to raise her profile, her character slowly becomes the centrefold of it all. The plot inside the show is about this characters dissociative identity disorder and that is directly addressed in a fade-out from a monologue in her room about her problems to being in an interview ward by the “actors” which is the “Oh Snap!” moment in films like Shutter Island and American Psycho. However, it is just revealed to be a plot of the show. The chains are off from this point onwards because you as the viewer are being thrown about left and right.

Mima continously wakes up in her room like an Alfred Hitchcock movie in almost a homage into how he intentionally fucked with his audience in his movies because it’s now interdimensional wasteland. The Pop Idol persona of Mima is now seemingly sentient and mockingly skips and jumps away from her and Mima is constantly chasing her through buildings and roads and then is hit by a truck being driven by the creepy incel man but then is seemingly fine in the next scene. Another instance of impossibility is when the scriptwriter of the show is in a carpark and hears pop music playing to then find it playing at immense volume from a boombox in an elevator. The next shot is of him completely gutted with his eyes gauged out. I’m not going to talk anymore about the plot and how the film executes said plot because I simply can’t do it justice.

What I absolutely love about this film is that is a true genre of cinema that is open to interpretation by definition. At no point does it spell out anything for you so you can be left in the dark just like the main character is. The murders of Mima’s agent and the scriptwriter are unclear but then the film blatantly shows Mima brutally slaughtering the modelling photographer with a screwdriver before it is revealed to be a subplot in Double Bind so you’re left wondering if any of that really happened at all. The subplots in this movie collide and mix like peaches and cream. Nothing really rises to the surface which is, I think, part of the point. Reality and fiction are just melting together like they’ve been thrown on a campfire. When you shovel the ash from the charcoal, it is indistinguishable.

You can get so deep into this film and that is why I love it so much. There’s room for feminist theory in how women in the industry are handled like they are male property, robbed of any real agency and are stripped from their identity. The movie comments on obsessive fans and otakus getting overly invested in the lives of celebrities which again, is still a thing today if not moreso. In the late 90′s, Mima is worried about what people are saying about her on the internet and is told to “just ignore it” but that is far easier said than done. It’s true here and it is true today. Pop stars are overexposed and it triggers the phenomenon we know today as “parasocial relationships” where people think they know celebrities like YouTubers or Streamers especially just because they see their face all the time and hear their voice all the time. I know from experience as an obsessed little boy that it’s like a worm enters your brain and you just think you can say what you like to entertainers because the internet has abled you to do so. That’s why so many fandoms fight for the person/property they love and, equally, attack persons/properties they don’t like as though it’s some kind of duty to fulfill as a user of the internet. This movie exemplifies these ideas with frightening accuracy because the creepy incel man is seen going out of his way to buy magazines with Mima in provocative poses to stop other people looking at her.

I could go on and on and on about this movie but that is quite enough I think. If you haven’t seen this movie, SEE THIS MOVIE. If you already have, SEE IT AGAIN. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must recommend this movie to obnoxious levels to all my friends and talk about it round the clock.