By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 15, 2007

"Paprika" may be a collective nightmare for its animated characters, but for viewers it's a heady flight through the helter-skelter mystery of dreams.

Directed by Japanese anime maestro Satoshi Kon, the new movie imagines a futuristic world where technology has broken the borders between dreams and reality. A head-fitting device known as the DC Mini -- it looks like headphones with stiletto attachments -- allows dream therapists to enter and monitor patients' dreams for psychotherapeutic purposes.

But this being Tokyo -- a metropolis of perpetual apocalyptic catastrophe in anime lore -- the DC Mini has fallen into evil hands. People's dreams are literally playing out across the city and passersby are being swept into the scary, surrealistic flow. It's up to dream researcher Atsuko Chiba (voiced by Megumi Hayashibara) to find the mastermind causing the havoc.

Part film noir, part sci-fi and mostly out-there fantasy, "Paprika" engulfs us in so many overlapping story lines and images that it's hard -- and in many ways, beside the point -- to keep up with the plot. Kon, whose inventive résumé includes 2001's "Millennium Actress" and 2003's "Tokyo Godfathers," has long established a visual style in which audiences virtually have to assume a waking dream state to follow it. But the result is pleasurable, as the ensemble of characters -- including a homicide captain, a rotund dream research assistant and, most intriguingly, the slinky Paprika, who is Atsuko's dreamland alter ego -- crash in and out of each other's dreams, looking for the source of all the trouble.

As animation's technology grows increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous, with CGI movies such as "Shrek" and "Over the Hedge" regularly filling multiplexes, it's easy to lose sight of the real magic of animation -- the story lines, the imaginative use of those images, the artistic thinking behind it all. Kon's dazzling virtuosity reminds us to appreciate the human imagination behind his two-dimensional work. And in a very real way, he brings us much closer to the film.

Watching a street parade of microwave ovens, samurai warriors and drum-playing frogs in "Paprika," we're reminded of our own organic dreammaking machinery -- and how we can get lost in our own reveries, believing every absurd development and awesome image that filters through our subconscious. And for my money, the kimono-clad doll whose piercing scream can shatter every window in a high-rise building is a character so personally startling, there's a very real chance she'll show up in one of my own dreams. Thank goodness I don't sleep by the window.

Paprika (90 minutes, in Japanese with subtitles, at AMC Loews Shirlington and Landmark's E Street Cinema) is rated R for cartoon violence, nudity, sexual situations and emotional intensity.