I Only Dreamed of You
Mima Kirigoe is ready to leave her career as a celebrated pop idol behind and pursue a dazzling future as an actress. However, shedding her former image proves far more difficult than she ever imagined, and the dark world of show business threatens to drag her into the depths of despair.
Is Mima able to keep a firm grasp on the things that define her while the strains of her new career path take their toll and a menacing presence from her pop-star past lurks in the background? And as delusions, fiction, and reality begin to blur in her mind, what is it that truly defines her in the first place?
Without a doubt, the 1997 film Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon, based on the novel of the same name by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, is one of those anime you must see before you die. And just last night, I was finally able to cross that very point off my bucket list. What begins as a story about a starlet and her stalker becomes increasingly entangled with each successive scene in a web of shattered dreams and dubious memories.
As an enthralled viewer, you break through one meta-layer after another with each of Mima’s thoughts—only to be utterly drained in the end by the torrent of psychotic impressions that has just washed over you. Who is Mima? Where is Mima? And above all: why is Mima?
Step by step, you witness how the initially sweet, cheerful, and naïve Mima is cast into a hell of depression, murder, and rape. Who can be trusted—and who cannot? When do you stop being yourself? And in the end, which decision was right—and which was wrong?
Perfect Blue is a visually striking and, thanks to Masahiro Ikumi’s fantastic soundtrack, sonically powerful journey into the deepest abysses of the human soul. The film shows that hope and despair are often separated by nothing more than a single unintended step, and that truth is frequently nothing more than a long-forgotten thought that may once have existed but was quietly replaced by fear, panic, and the longing for a redeeming answer.