Have you ever woken up from a dream and been really disappointed that it wasn’t real?

Last night, I really liked where my dream was going. It started out with some kind of crazy canoe trip on a river, I think, and then I was sleeping in a co-worker’s laundry room, I think… You know, random weird dream stuff. But then after that, it got good.

I was walking around a small town in the middle of the night, and I came to this strip mall with a few big box stores and an office building. None of the doors were locked, so I was wandering around inside, looking at things.

I went into the office building and climbed the stairs to the top floor. (I don’t think it was a super tall building.) To my surprise, there were lots of people in various cubicles, working away as if it were the middle of the day. There was a cute girl with short hair working at a computer, and she said hi to me, and somehow we got into a conversation. I noticed that she had some orange and navy blue clothing folded up on her desk, and discovered that it was a Naruto costume. She also had a Hinata costume. Read the rest of this entry…

I just finished watching an anime film called Paprika. I wanted to see it because Graham Stark from Loading Ready Run mentioned it off-hand while we were shooting a video. (Or rather, he and some other Loading Ready Run crew members were shooting the video, while I was tagging along and filming them for a Behind-the-Scenes video.) Graham was talking about the “line of action”, which is a film-making concept, and he said they discussed it in the film Paprika, so off I went to find it and watch it.

It was a really well-done movie. The animation was great, the art was excellent, the writing was pretty strong. It lost marks in two places, though: first, it got a little too titillating for my tastes; second, it lost the handle on its core concept during its climactic sequence.

This is something that happens to all-too-many concept-based movies. When a film leans its entire premise on something mind-bending, like alternate realities or time travel or, in the case of Paprika, the dream world, it faces a very difficult challenge: it needs to develop a consistency and logic behind its gimmick, and it has to deliver either a kick-awesome entertainment session or a powerful message (or, in the case of the best of high-concept movies, both).

The majority of concept movies, in my experience, sacrifice internal logic for entertainment or message. Paprika is one of these films: it seems to abandon all efforts to make sense just so that it can deliver its denoument. It didn’t leave me thinking either, “That was so cool!” or, “Wow, I’m going to have to sit down and think about that for a while.” Instead, it left me thinking, “Ok, so what happened there? I think they won, but how? And why?”

Actually, now that I think of it, this is the way a great deal of anime movies leave me. Howl’s Moving Castle, Nausicaa, and Princess Mononoke all gave me the same sort of feeling afterwards, to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe it’s just a symptom of a cultural disconnect.

Other examples of conceptual disconnects can be seen in some of Terry Pratchett’s writing (which is incredibly entertaining but frequently difficult to unravel during its conclusions).

For the sake of contrasting these things with concept movies that I think do a good job of maintaining internal logic while still delivering entertainment and/or message, see Donnie Darko or The Matrix (but not the Matrix sequels). These movies succeed because, while complex, they are still accessible and consistent enough that their internal reasoning can be puzzled together without too much guesswork or philosophy. Their core gimmick can be understood, and that makes their message and entertainment value that much stronger.