Cyberpunk: Paprika Viewing

For cyberpunk, I watched the animated film Paprika. Truly a mindfuck. I love anime films like Akira and Perfect Blue that really twist the realms of reality and take that weirdness dial and crank it up to eleven. Paprika is no different. This film perfectly blurs the lines between reality and dreams. I’m more surprised that I’ve never watched this before. 

A motif I found in this movie was that things were always in motion. Even the more mundane and expository scenes such as the scientists talking is shown in motion, with them walking down the hallway and not having this conversation simple in an office. The information is given concisely with no loss of movement. And while yes, there are still scenes. This movie is full of seamless transitional scenes where a moving scene quickly goes from the real world to the dream realm. 


I was talking about cyberpunk as a genre to a friend of mine, and he argued that cyberpunk meant it needed to have robots in it. And yes, that is a stable in this genre, but Paprika is an answer to that. It defines cyberpunk as being a genre, not about robots, but about surreal elements, and the blending of reality and dreams. It questions what reality really is. It has the same effect that the Matrix had. 

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