Movie Brawl: Inception vs. Paprika

Which of these films is the stuff that dreams are made of?

Hey ho, it’s Karl again, and guess what kids… it’s time for another brawl!

Sometimes in the world of media, an idea gets recycled. Oftentimes this is intentional. Hollywood loves to rehash ideas that were already successful because they know that people are mostly sheep and will pay good money to see something they’ve already seen. What, you think the theaters are swamped with sequels and remakes every year because they’re artistically moving? But sometimes – and these are the interesting times – someone genuinely sets out to make a movie out of a completely original idea… that isn’t. Writers don’t know the details of every story ever written of course. Sure, the premises of Batman, Casablanca, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians are pretty much common knowledge, but classics like those are the exception. A lot of good stories are obscure, and writers who don’t know about them can end up coming up with the same stories under different names.

Fun fact: did you know that calculus was invented by two different mathematicians, in two different parts of the world, at more or less the same time? That isn’t important to this review or anything, I just thought I’d go ahead and alienate my already paltry audience by talking about math in a movie blog.

Anyway, there was this little movie that hit theaters this year called Inception. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s the story of a man whose job is to enter other people’s dreams and see their innermost thoughts. It’s gotten lots of praise for its originality and depth and even got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (not that anyone ever thought it had a chance of winning, but still). It’s been a common reference on the Internet and on TV, and everyone loves it for its unique and creative concept.

And, you guessed it, that concept has been done before.

No, I’m not talking about the Beagle Boys. But… yeah, the Beagle Boys did it, too.

This brings us back to our old friend Satoshi Kon. Though he only directed four movies in his tragically short life, each one was hailed as a masterwork, especially his debut work Perfect Blue and a somehow even more bizarre piece of mindfuckery by the name of Paprika. Like Perfect Blue, which I reviewed for my very first entry on this blog, Paprika was a chance for Kon to do what he did best: blur the perception of reality. And whereas Perfect Blue did this by telling the story through the eyes of a woman going mad, Paprika does it just like Inception, with a person exploring other people’s dreams. And that’s why we’re here. Two films, one premise; who comes out on top?

Let’s start with story. Inception begins as Leonardo DiCaprio and that annoying kid from Third Rock from the Sun enter Ken Watanabe’s dreams to steal his business secrets. Since they aren’t nearly badass enough to outwit the goddamn Last Samurai, the plan fails, but he’s impressed by their strategy of creating a dream within the dream and offers them a new job.

“I accept as long as it’s not Memoirs of a Geisha.”

The plan is to plant an idea in a business rival’s mind, a supposedly impossible process called “inception”. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a title! So Leo and his crew gather some new teammates, including… Juno… because why not... and break into the dreams of the Scarecrow from Batman Begins. Yeah, the characters actually have names, but it’s not like I ever bothered to learn them.

So the strategy is to create a dream within a dream within a dream, and implant the suggestion at the deepest level so that Scarecrow will wake up thinking it was his own idea. The idea they want to plant is that he should break up the business that he just inherited from his father, so they want to use his relationship with his father as an emotional trigger. While ethically horrifying, this plan is strategically sound, but immediately Leo fucks things up by letting his own subconscious add elements to the dream.

Damn it, Leo, all you had to do was not imagine yourself getting hit by a freight train. Is that really so hard?

The reason Leo’s head is messing everything up is that he’s an emotional wreck. Early in the film he claims that he has successfully performed inception before, but as events play out it is revealed that he had done it accidentally, causing his wife to believe that the world was an illusion and commit suicide.  As the film reaches its climax, the team successfully performs inception on Scarecrow but the Watanabe gets trapped in a dreamworld limbo and Leo has to confront his demons and his past to rescue him. The movie ends with Leo being reunited with his children, but makes it unclear whether this is reality or another dream.

In Paprika, the dream-exploration technology isn’t being used to steal ideas, but for psychoanalysis. The heroine is Dr. Chiba, a scientist testing the experimental technology for use in therapy. In dreams, she takes on a persona named Paprika, through whom she has the opportunity to let out her outgoing and playful side. The trouble begins when the dream-sharing technology is stolen. The culprit soon begins hacking into people’s brains and causing them to enter one collective dream, even when awake.

This kind of dream. And keep in mind, this is still the part of the movie that makes sense.

Chiba investigates along with the inventor of the technology, the brilliant but childish and morbidly obese Dr. Tokita. They first suspect Tokita’s assistant Himuro, but after Himuro himself is found to be a victim of the hacker, Tokita enters Himuro’s dreams to ask him what’s going on. But Tokita only ends up getting trapped in the dream, and Chiba has to enter the dream as Paprika to rescue him. She is unable to find Tokita, but along the way discovers that the true culprits are the chairman of her company and one of her own researchers, Osanai. Osanai had used sex to manipulate Himuro into letting him use the device for his own ends. And those ends are… well…

Mustn’t… steal… Nostalgia Critic’s… jokes… Must… resist… OF COURSE!! oh goddammit.

Chiba wakes up, and goes to confront the chairman in the real world… but it turns out it was a dream within a dream and she is still asleep. As such, the chairman, who controls the dream, is easily able to take her captive. Osanai tries to use the opportunity to take advantage of Chiba, but the chairman will have none of that, and while the two of them turn against each other, Chiba is rescued by Captain Konakawa, a policeman who she had been treating as Paprika, when he crosses over from his own dream to the chairman’s. Chiba wakes up for real this time, and thus ends the portion of the movie that makes any fucking sense whatsoever.

After deciding that they really are in the real world and not just another nested dream, Chiba sets out to find the chairman. She doesn’t get far, though, before she’s attacked by a giant doll. It seems that dreams and reality are merging together… somehow… and the only way to stop it is to find the chairman… for some reason. On the plus side, this merging together of dreams and reality causes Chiba and Paprika to split into two separate bodies… because…

Oh. Silly me. Apparently that’s not important.

Dr. Tokita, still dreaming, appears as a giant toy robot and takes out the evil doll. Paprika goes to find the chairman while Chiba stays behind to try to wake Tokita up. And Tokita eats her. Wow. I believe that qualifies as an epic fail. Meanwhile the chairman rises out of the ground as an all-powerful giant and begins spreading darkness across the world. Paprika decides to join Chiba inside Tokita, which creates a giant baby who eats the giant chairman and sets everything back in order.  Because yeah, that’s totally a logical way to end this. As the film ends, Chiba tells Captain Konakawa that she’s going to marry Tokita, and Konakawa heads to the movies, where… wait a minute…

Subtle, Kon. Subtle.

So, yeah, a lot of the same stuff in the two movies: building dreams, dreams within dreams, uncertainty about the nature of reality, etc. But they go in very different directions with those ideas. Inception is more psychological and introspective in tone, whereas Paprika is more about visual artistry and adventure. If we’re going to pick a winner here, we’ll have to look at it from a few different angles.

Best Story: Gonna have to go with Inception on this one. Paprika tried for a much bigger story than Inception did, but it could be argued that it was bigger than it needed to be. As screwed up as it was, the movie actually moved along nicely when it focused on the investigation of who stole the dream device and why. When it got to the world-in-peril stuff, it all fell apart. It stopped making any sense, the writers didn’t even bother trying to explain the blatant plot holes, and the ending was a complete ass pull. In contrast, Inception was wise enough to keep its story focused on what was important: the job, and Leo’s past. There was no world-threatening peril in it; there didn’t need to be. The audience is invested enough in the story at hand that it doesn’t need to be made any grander. I think it marks the difference between American and Japanese movies. Japan likes things big and flashy, so “end of the world” scenarios pop up all the time in Japanese films. Oddly, Satoshi Kon’s other films avoided this trope and were all wonderful films… though to be fair, his one TV series Paranoia Agent also led up to a world in peril, and I thought it worked pretty well there. But here it hurts more than helps. Point goes to Inception.

Best Characters: This one’s kind of tough, because both movies feature one or two interesting characters and a number of bland ones. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception was intriguing and complex, but Ellen Page (as talented an actress as she is) just couldn’t make me care about her character because there’s nothing unique or engaging about her. Likewise, the dual personality of Dr. Chiba and Paprika was fascinating, but the villains were one-dimensional and forgettable. In the end, I think I have to give the point to Paprika, because while Inception did a great job fleshing out Leonardo DiCaprio’s character and explaining what makes him tick, Paprika took the opposite approach and never gave any explanation for why the main character has multiple personalities. That’s bold. And it creates a sense of mystery that just makes the movie more interesting to watch. It’s like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction; it makes us wonder, but if we learned the answer it would ruin the whole thing.

“In retrospect, these glow-in-the-dark Spiderman stickers probably weren’t worth killing three people over.”

Best Writing: Both films have a lot of tricks involved in how they tell their stories. They both involve dreams within dreams, for instance, and both use dream imagery to delve into their characters’ back stories. Both films handle the subtleties of the plot well, but I’m going to give the point to Inception. There are a lot of little things going on in Inception. The logic and practicalities of exploring dreams are really well analyzed. One of the most memorable things about the film is that each character carries a “totem”, a small personal item that behaves differently in dreams than in real life, to allow them to know whether they’re really awake or not. It’s a small detail, but used for great effect because the uncertainty of reality is the movie’s central theme. Paprika doesn’t worry about that kind of thing, so Inception really pulls ahead in that regard.

The only drawback is that applying that much logic to dreams ultimately reduces the amount of stuff you’re able to do and creates some weird plot holes. How can the brain automatically detect inception? Why does doing crazy stuff in a dream make the brain notice it more? Why does a dream within a dream move at a different rate than a dream? None of this stuff really makes any sense if you think about it. But you know what? This is a science fiction movie; of course there’s going to be some illogical stuff going on. It all comes down to suspension of disbelief; it’s not bothersome if we just accept that within the confines of the movie, these things are true. The plot holes in Paprika are distracting and troublesome, and don’t fall into the suspension of disbelief category. It isn’t to say that Paprika doesn’t have its own shining moments. The relationship between Himuro and Osanai is revealed gradually and with wonderful subtlety, Tokita’s personality is shown in both positive and negative lights, and Konakawa’s psyche is explored nicely. But Inception just does it all with more consistency and depth, so it’s Inception’s win.

Best Visuals: Paprika. Fucking. Wins.

Seriously, this one’s no contest. Paprika literally has more dazzling visuals in the first ten minutes than the entirety of Inception put together. Just the opening credits are enough to win an award. Paprika’s freezing time, jumping in and out of pictures, flying on cartoon rockets… Find it on YouTube or something. It’ll blow your mind, and that’s a promise. The best Inception has is some exploding fruit and some fistfights in shifting gravity. And those are great, but compared to Paprika they’re nothing. Paprika has the title character flying on a cloud dressed like Goku from Saiyuki, being swallowed by a whale with a human face, having her body ripped open like a cocoon to reveal Chiba inside, and more. It’s fun. It’s imaginative. It’s downright insane sometimes. It’s exactly what I wanted to see in a movie about dreams. Granted, it’s animated, giving it far more freedom than the live-action Inception, but that’s hardly an excuse. When a movie is about exploring dreams, the audience wants to see something incredible. Inception has some little things that are pretty cool: Escher-esque staircases, dream cities, crumbling cliffs, and the like. But nothing really incredible. For incredible, you have to go with Paprika.

So where does that leave us? The score is tied, and both films have a lot going for them, so which is the winner? Well, honestly, I’m hesitant to declare one better than the other. It all really depends on what you’re looking for in a movie. Like I said earlier, Inception is a great psychological movie and Paprika brings the visuals and imagination. And I like them both in their own rights. But I’m not trying to weasel my way out of this – I’m just going to have to go back to the start to pick a winner. The reason I’m having these two films brawl is their similar premise: movies about exploring dreams. That’s what I’m going to use as my criteria. They’re both fine films, but to pick one in terms of being about dreams, I have to pick Paprika.

Yeah, Paprika’s got some plot problems and can be gruesomely disturbing at times, but Satoshi Kon knew that the important thing in a movie about dreams was the imagination of it. And that he delivered. When I watch Paprika, I never forget that I’m watching a movie about dreams. Inception seems to lose track of that from time to time. Watch both movies with the sound off, and how easy would it be to figure out what each one’s about? With Inception, it might be hard to judge, but you would understand Paprika right away. Paprika is simply more… well… dream-ish than Inception, and that’s what sways it for me. And there you have it: the winner of the brawl and another feather in Satoshi Kon’s cap, Paprika.

"Who’s king of the world now, Leo?"

And that does it for this brawl. For my next installment, I promise I’ll pick something a little less anime-ish. Until then, I’m Karl, fighting tedium one dream within a dream at a time. See ya!

Inception and all related images are property of Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures and Syncopy. Paprika and all related images are property of Sony Pictures and Mad House. Images used from Inception, Paprika, Duck Tales comics, and Pulp Fiction, for reviewing purposes only.