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canon
Director
Satoshi Kon
Year
1997
Country
Japan
Runtime
81 min

Also released as

  • Pāfekuto Burū
  • Paafekuto Buruu
  • Pafekuto Buru
  • 蓝色恐惧
  • The Perfect Blue
  • 未麻之部屋
  • パーフェクトブルー
  • เพอร์เฟค บลู
  • PERFECT BLUE パーフェクト ブルー
  • Совершенная грусть
  • Идеальная синева
  • PERFECT BLUE Remastered
  • Mükemmel Mavi
  • Perfect Blue

Filed under

Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon's animated thriller about a pop idol losing herself, and Aronofsky bought the remake rights just to reuse a shot.

A member of a Japanese pop group quits to become a serious actress. A stalker maintains a website that writes her diary in her voice, more accurately than she could. She stops being able to tell what she has done.

Satoshi Kon made his first film an animated psychological horror precisely because animation could dissolve the line between Mima's reality and her breakdown, cutting between identical rooms and repeated mornings so you lose your footing exactly as she does.

It is about the manufacture and consumption of a young woman as a product, and it was made in 1997, well before the internet made that universal.

Aronofsky has acknowledged lifting the bathtub shot for Requiem for a Dream and the entire structure informs Black Swan.

It is one of the few animated films that is truly, unambiguously horror, and it is better than almost all of its live-action peers.

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Trailer

The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

poster
JA · poster
JA · poster
FR · poster
ZH · poster
JA · poster
JA · poster

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