Studio: Madhouse
Distributor: Rex Entertainment
Short Synopsis
Mima Kirigoe, a member of the pop idol group CHAM!, announces that she is leaving music to become an actress. Some of her fans are upset, and one, Me-Mania, a disfigured security guard, is obsessed with her. Mima finds a website, "Mima's Room", written as though by her, recording her daily life in uncanny detail and insisting that the real Mima would never give up being an idol. She takes a small part in a crime drama, Double Bind, and to advance her career agrees to a degrading rape scene and nude photographs, which shatter her pure idol image. People connected with these decisions begin to be murdered. Mima starts to see a ghostly double of her idol self, who taunts her, and she can no longer tell her own life apart from the role she is playing in the drama, from dreams, or from the diary on the website. In the climax, Me-Mania attacks her, and then her manager, Rumi, who has been living in the fantasy of being the "real Mima" and has been committing the murders, tries to kill her. Mima survives, and later, visiting Rumi in hospital, she declares that she is the real thing.
Why It Matters
- Kon's editing is the film's great achievement: scenes cut seamlessly between reality, the television drama, dreams and Mima's breakdown, so the audience shares her confusion about what is real. Its treatment of celebrity, stalking and identity in the early internet age was startlingly prescient.
- It was Satoshi Kon's first feature, and it established him as one of the most original directors in animation. Its psychological style influenced filmmakers far beyond anime, most often cited in comparisons with Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.
Notes and Trivia
- It began as a planned live-action film before becoming an animated feature.
- Kon went on to make Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika before his death in 2010.
- See also: Ghost in the Shell (1995), Princess Mononoke (1997).