Character · Paprika
Paprika
A dream therapist has an alter ego who can go anywhere in a sleeping mind, and something else has started using the same door.
In Otakana the clue reads: Dream detective alter ego of a researcher
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Paprika
- Letters
- 7 · Hard
Paprika is the name Doctor Atsuko Chiba uses inside other people's dreams: red-haired, cheerful, and unbound by the caution the waking scientist runs on. The device that lets her in is the DC Mini, a prototype small enough to pocket and, as the film opens, missing. Whoever took it can enter a mind uninvited, and the victim does not have to be asleep.
The image everyone remembers is the parade, a procession of refrigerators, torii gates, dolls and marching frogs that swells every time it absorbs another mind. Satoshi Kon cuts between dream and waking in a way that lies to the audience, so a scene will reveal two shots late that it was never real to begin with. The film runs ninety minutes and does not slow down inside them.
Madhouse released Paprika in 2006, adapted from Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel. It was Kon's last completed film; he died in 2010 at forty-six, leaving one more unfinished. Its influence on later dream cinema gets argued about constantly, usually with Inception somewhere in the frame, and the corridor imagery makes the comparison difficult to drop.
Spelling PAPRIKA
PAPRIKA is seven letters and, helpfully, also the spice. English and Japanese agree here: the Japanese reads Papurika, adding only the vowel it needs after the second P and dropping nothing at all. Watch the middle. It is PRI, not PER or PAR, so the word runs pa-pri-ka in three beats and that I is the letter people leave out.