Horrorfest 2013: Perfect Blue

Now we travel to Japan for 1998's PERFECT BLUE, an animated psychological thriller about a young woman who leaves her career as part of a squeaky-clean all-girl pop group in favor of a new career as an actress in a gritty crime drama, upsetting her fans in the process, with murderous results.

Although I've seen plenty of great Japanese animated films in my day, I've also unfairly dismissed the genre at times for a few reasons. Fans of the genre tend to claim every movie is the greatest, not unlike fans of martial arts, so it gets tough to tell the crap from the good stuff. I can only be fooled so many times. There's also tons of it -- especially now that all kinds of media is immediately available all the time, so everything gets exported, not just the stuff that rises to the top. You could argue a dismissal like this would be similar to someone saying they hate all American films because they got tricked into seeing something like ARMAGEDDON one too many times and you know what -- that's fair. But, I wouldn't blame someone for hating all American films because of ARMAGEDDON. So there you go.

Anyway, PERFECT BLUE is interesting because it embraces the hallmarks of Japanese animation while subverting them. When I say "hallmarks" I mean... well, it's hard to describe, and I don't want to write off an entire culture by painting in broad strokes but... you know, like... lots of these cartoons seem to be about innocent little girls and their panties.

There, I said it.

To PERFECT BLUE's credit, it's totally willing to explore this, as the story directly involves the objectification of women, the relationship between fans and stars, and where these things blur and become gray areas. Is it objectification if the woman is in on it? Does a star owe anything to their fans?

These aren't the only lines that are blurred as the story unfolds. As our heroine moves from pop stardom to starring in a show involving nudity and explicit rape scenes, she begins to doubt her own identity. She's somewhat willingly going along with the racy photo shoots and traumatic scenes, but then deeply regrets them and has a hard time reconciling them later. It gets to the point where she seems to have a dual personality -- the pop star persona she left behind is taunting her, telling her she's damaged goods, making the wrong decisions, won't be taken seriously anymore, is now an impostor.

At the same time, real murders are happening. Or are they? Things seem to be piling up in a way that implicate our heroine -- is she killing without knowing it? Or, is it the creepy security guard who seems obsessed with her, killing on her "behalf"?

The movie gets off to a slow start but as reality starts to unravel and the plot thickens, it really picks up steam and races towards a pretty cool conclusion that surprised me.

Is the movie totally exonerated for it's more exploitative qualities, by being about exploitation? Not exactly, I don't think -- it revels a little too much in the nudity and violence to really hammer its point home. But, it gets points for trying. If you HAVE to have rape in your Japanese animation (which seems to be a recurring theme in the medium), at least use it to try to make a point.