For Fans of Satoshi Kon

Perfect Blue is regularly described as a psychological thriller, which is accurate but undersells it. It is a horror film about what celebrity does to a person's sense of self, and what a certain kind of fan does to a celebrity's sense of safety. Kon was working from Yoshikazu Takeuchi's novel, but the film transcends its source: the sequence edits alone, collapsing Mima's film role into her actual life, are among the most formally inventive in 1990s cinema. Darren Aronofsky bought the rights partly to rotoscope the bathtub scene for Requiem for a Dream. That is the level of craft here.

Kon adapted Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel Paprika in 2006, four years before Christopher Nolan released Inception. The visual vocabulary of dreams invading waking life, corridors of memory folding in on themselves, a charismatic woman navigating a fractured psyche: the overlap is not coincidence. Nolan has acknowledged the film. What Kon does that Inception does not is refuse to explain the logic. The film trusts its audience to feel the disorientation rather than solve it.

Fans who come to Millennium Actress after Perfect Blue are sometimes surprised by how openly sentimental it is. There is still the Kon signature, a documentary crew that slides into the films they are reviewing, a protagonist whose life and roles become indistinguishable. But the engine here is longing rather than paranoia. The through-line of an actress chasing a man she loved for sixty years across Japanese film history is genuinely moving, and the final image is one of the most quietly devastating in animated cinema.

Paranoia Agent, Kon's only TV series, was conceived as a container for ideas that did not fit his features, and it shows: episodes vary wildly in genre, from police procedural to absurdist comedy to ghost story. That variety is the point. The urban legend of Shonen Bat (a kid on roller skates who attacks people with a bent golden bat) becomes a lens for examining how societies manufacture and share anxiety. Watch it too fast and it feels scattered. Give each episode a few days and the accumulation does something strange to you.