Satoshi Kon
Satoshi Kon is a writer, born 1963.
Satoshi Kon trained as a graphic designer at Musashino Art University and came into animation by way of manga, which shows in everything he later directed. His films are drawn with a designer's eye for the single arresting frame and cut with an editor's impatience.
The transition is the thing he did better than almost anyone. Kon would end a shot in one reality and open the next in another, matching a gesture or a sound so precisely that the seam vanishes, and the viewer only notices afterwards that the ground has moved. Perfect Blue used it to keep an audience unsure which layer of a performer's life it was watching. Millennium Actress folded an interview into the films its subject had made. Paprika ran the same trick through a story about entering dreams and let the imagery escalate until the boundary stopped mattering.
Not all of it was formal play. Tokyo Godfathers is a warm, funny Christmas story told on the streets of Tokyo, and Paranoia Agent, his only television series, spread the anxiety across an ensemble rather than a single mind. He kept drawing throughout, and Satoshi Kon's Opus collects the manga side of the same imagination.
Kon died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at 46, having directed four features and one series. It is a small body of work by any measure, and there is almost nothing weak in it.
Movies (7)
TV (1)
Books (1)
Where to start with Satoshi Kon
Perfect Blue first, and go in cold. It is his debut feature and the purest demonstration of the technique, a thriller whose cuts do the work a lesser film would hand to dialogue. Follow it with Millennium Actress, which turns the same slippage toward romance and regret instead of fear.
Tokyo Godfathers is the one to reach for if those two sound punishing. It is generous, comic and set at Christmas, and it proves he was never only a stylist. Save Paprika for last, since it is the loudest and most maximal of the four and reads better once you can see the ideas he had spent a decade refining. Paranoia Agent is the long-form version for anyone who wants more, and Satoshi Kon's Opus is the way sideways into his manga.