2006 Satoshi Kon's PAPRIKA & Vocaloid Soundtrack

 

Vocaloid was used extensively by Composer Susumu Hirasawa in the soundtrack to the 2006 Anime Paprika. A film to later have a few concepts & scenes "borrowed" in 2010s INCEPTION.  More than a few.  

In the early 1990s I developed a Smalltalk/DSP system in Roland Japan R&D I demonstrated and wanted to use in developing a "singing" synthesizer. Management said don't need that, and a couple of years later Yamaha came out with Vocaloid, a singing synthesizer.  Is it what I would have developed? I don't know as I didn't get that far.  In Japan, it also generated the virtual Idol, such as Hatsune Miku and that is a whole other thing.

So I have an interest in things "singing" synthesizer, and only found out about the anime Paprika through a post about the storyboard art book this week.  A bit of following the threads, and the soundtrack becomes something I need to hear, the use of vocaloid, and other works of Susumu Hirasawa. Then I need to see the movie:

So I got the Bluray on Amazon. Wow.

Dreams vs Reality, and Paprika's weird/ surrealism leaves it up to the viewer to interpret. Or does it? 

The Anime is based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, but Kon was much more interested in producing interesting visuals than explaining character motives, so unless you know the book, which is like nobody,  the result is amazing to look at but much is not "obviously" unexplained. May be vaguely hinted at with Interpretive Dance, is closer to the approach taken 😀 .

The composer also influenced Kon, with his philosophy.  Composer Susumu Hirasawa was also an Amiga user at the time, so was original enough not to be an Artists only use APPLE guy and took advantage of the unique real time midi effects BARS & PIPES provided.

So I have now seen the movie, listened to the Soundtrack a fair few times, and read about the novel and how that was interpreted in the film.  One of the essays I saw mentions all the references to film in the anime, so it is could be more a Reality vs Film thing.  I think Kon just liked Film images, so put them in.  You could interpret it as as Reality vs DrugUser  too, were leaving reality for "the other place" destroys your life. 

Satoshi Kon died of pancreatic cancer at 46 years ago now, so he doesn't have any further insight into it.

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