Over the weekend my son and I headed over to his uncle's house for our monthly movie night. We let his uncle pick since he hosts, and he has pretty good taste in movies. He is trustworthy and reliable. This month he picked an anime called "Paprika".

This is the first anime I have ever seen. I have wanted to watch some before, but I have passed it up time and time again. I was pleased that this choice was made and the time to watch anime had finally come. I have never heard of this movie, I saw a preview awhile back, which looked rad and we settled down to check it out. This movie is great. I was interested the whole time. The story was intriguing, the animation was incredible and it was only 90 minutes long. This was a win in every situation for me.

For those that may not know, "Paprika" is about a company that makes a machine that can enter into people's brains and people that are awake can see what is going on. The host mentioned to us that they had heard Christopher Nolan got the idea for "Inception" from this movie. That is very easy to see after watching "Paprika". The whole idea here is that a person, Paprika, can enter dreams and guide people through them. Good and bad, Paprika helps them get through it, and when it gets bad, she wakes them up and they go over the dream together. There is a hitch in their plan, when a very powerful person starts to go into everyone's dreams and uses that to take over the world. We see a bunch of different people going to sleep, entering their REM cycle and having some of the wildest dreams I've ever seen put on film. There are carnivals, chases, lookalikes, mystery, deceit and some truly terrifying images that some have in their nightmares. When things start to come together in this movie, it gets tense in all the best possible ways. I was sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see what was going to happen. The climatic scene is pretty wonderful. The imagery, the way the story wraps up and what follows is pretty cool and very well done.

And while the story is very, very well done, the animation sets this movie aside from all other movies. The screen is filled, the entire movie, with something and something is always moving. Be it in a police officer's office, the blinds are all there and when the wind blows they move. When they enter a bar in a computer world, the liquid in the bottles move. The bartenders are constantly making facial gestures. The carnival scenes are truly a thing of wonder. To fill up all of that screen time with some of the craziest imagery I have ever seen must have taken a very, very long time and must have been done by some super talented artists and filmmakers. The fact that they took the time, the care and the process to go through all this means they really cared about what they were going to put on screen. I appreciate that as a viewer, and it made the movie even better.

I highly recommend checking this movie out if you have not seen it yet. Seeing this makes me want to watch more anime in the future. "Paprika" is a very, very good movie made by some very talented people. 

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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