PARANOIA AGENT

To waste as little of your time as possible, lets start at the top shall we? Satoshi Kon’s “Paranoia Agent” is the best anime that I have ever seen. It now stands at the top of my ‘short list’ with other notables like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Cowboy Bebop, Last Exile, Berzerk and Escaflowne. There are many reasons why PA is a sort of Magna Carta for a new brand of storytelling in animation, but what is most important about it is that it’s primary focus is people. People like you and me, with jobs, frustrations, dreams and faults are drawn into a series of events that clearly draws the line between humanity and it’s collective consciousness. Let it suffice to say that they aren’t going to get along very well.

At the start it’s easy for a fan of my stripe to fall in love with PA. Anime’s annoying conventions are totally missing. No magical girls, buxom assassins, space invaders, robots, harems or wacky hi-jinks. Graphically as well the tried and boring anime conventions are missing. PA maintains a highly realistic style even when depicting seriously fantastic situations. Everything is rendered with an attention to detail that brings you to Japan and leaves you to be stunned by the events unfolding there. And with all those fine points what is actually important about this realistic treatment is that it serves the viewer in bringing the emotional consequences of the character’s choices to life. At many points we can point at the screen and realize that we have been in those places ourselves. Leaving anime conventions behind and creating some real persons to live out these events, Satoshi Kon makes PA personally relevant. It reminds me a little of Big O in that regard, but succeeds by orders of magnitude more.

PA is told in a series of short stories woven together by the notorious Shonen Bat and his ardent pursuers, a pair of police detectives who are in way over their heads. Their antagonism takes a break in disc three but comes back in full force in the ending eps with the victor clearly decided, another great surprise for anime viewers sick of every cerebral anime ending in some kind of irrational non-sequitur. Of course none of the principal characters survives the show in a recognizable form, all persons involved changing in drastic ways one way or another. Every person involved in the plot either profits or withers according to their actions.

I’m not going to talk a lot about the technical aspects of the shows I write about, but in this instance I want to highlight the voice work for PA. The English dub is a sterling effort and English speakers should really hear this one first. The fact is that I am sure that the stable of voice actors involved were pushed to perform in many ways by the AMAZING Japanese voice work on the show. Especially in the instance of Detective Ikari the quality of the talent and the voice direction is a serious achievement. Of course both sets of actors are aided by the fact that PA usually lacks the twitching/blinking face-holes that many animators consider mouths, but it is still a joy to hear either way.

There are a few niggling problems, though. Sometimes the changes from ep to ep are quite drastic, entire rafts of characters abandoned for another. The main chars always return, but it can be disorienting. Also some of the content can be disturbing to the casual anime fan. Kon’s characters express a wide range of faults and compulsions and sometimes the ugliness is shockingly blunt. I can count this among my favorite aspects of the show, but I can see how others may shy away from it.

Studying the show after the fact gives us the impression that we’ve seen the first hard science fiction story in anime since shows like Lain and Key. It’s a story about normal people confronting forces they have no way to understand let alone combat until they are enlightened in some fashion, until Shonen Bat is somehow brought to heel. The trip is dark, emotional, violent and wholly satisfying. It reminds me of a Scorcese film, the kind of experience you survive rather than idley view from a distance. You’re there, and when it’s over you stay there. The story was rattling around in my head for days after I finished it. You end up rooting with all your might for totally un-fantastic persons against an evil that we all possess in some way. People go crazy, realities are warped, and dreams are reduced to rubble, but fakers can become saviors and everyone kinda gets the idea that they weren’t as powerless as they thought they were. It’s a great message if you ask me.

My suggestion: Buy it, love it and tell your friends. I’ll tell you this, the industry is preparing another 26 ep jaunt where gender roles are set on their ear at the hot springs and the festival grounds and no one knows where the madcap hilarity will end!!! Do you really want to be responsible for that, even in part? Buy Paranoia Agent and do something good for us all. Really.

-maguro