I Only Dreamed of You

Mima Kirigoe is ready to leave her career as a celebrated pop idol behind and pursue an even brighter future as an actress. However, shedding her former image proves more difficult than she imagined, as the murky world of show business threatens to pull her into the depths of despair. The strain of her new path gradually takes its toll, while a menacing presence from her past lurks in the background. Can Mima hold on to what truly matters to her? And as delusion, fiction, and reality blur in her mind, what truly drives her? Mima embarks on a psychologically harrowing journey into the farthest corners of man-made insanity.

Without a doubt, the 1997 film Perfect Blue, directed by Satoshi Kon and based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, is one of those anime films you must see before you die. And I was finally able to cross it off my bucket list recently. What begins as a story about a starlet and her obsessed stalker gradually transforms into a web of broken dreams and unreliable memories. As a tense viewer, I descended through one meta-level after another alongside Mima’s unraveling thoughts, until I was left completely exhausted by the torrent of psychotic impressions that overwhelmed me. Who is Mima? Where is Mima? And, most importantly: Why is Mima?

Step by step, I witnessed Mima, sweet, cheerful, and naive at the start, being thrust into a hell of depression, murder, and violation. Who can I trust? When do I stop being myself? And, in the end, which decisions were right - and which were wrong? Perfect Blue is a visually stunning and sonically powerful journey into the darkest depths of the human soul, enhanced by Masahiro Ikumi’s fantastic soundtrack. The film masterfully illustrates how hope and despair are often just an unintended step apart, and how the truth may be nothing more than a long-forgotten thought, quietly replaced by fear, panic, and the desperate search for a redemptive answer.