An anime master revs up the old dream machine

BOTH dread and delight course through the anime films of Satoshi Kon, who is widely recognized as a master of the genre. The Japanese director (“Millennium Actress,” “Tokyo Godfathers”) explores the polarity further in his newest film, “Paprika,” in which sleeping and waking, fantasy and nightmare collide. Adapted from a popular novel by sci-fi notable Yasutaka Tsutsui, Kon took the tale for his own.

“I thought the story was fascinating because it allows you to get inside a dream,” the filmmaker says through an interpreter on a stopover in Los Angeles. “The world of the dream presents puzzles hidden within, and the story featured this device, the DC Mini, which allows the dream to become part of reality, and this causes all kinds of chaos.”

Kon, 44, is a slender man in a meticulously fitted dark suit whose appearance seems to belie his “mad creator” reputation. His long hair is neatly pulled back into a ponytail, and he wears techie wire-rimmed glasses.

A graduate of Musashino Art University, he entered the anime industry by working as a background and layout artist and as a screenwriter. He worked with Mamoru Oshii on “Patlabor 2: The Movie” as well as on a manga series. In 1998 he wrote and directed his first feature, “Perfect Blue,” a Hitchcockian thriller about a pop singer trying to turn actress who is stalked by a lunatic fan. That too was adapted from a novel, but already Kon was asserting his auteurship -- he overhauled the story and added scenes in which the real world and the overactive imagination get tossed into a blender. The film got mixed reviews but won him a following -- and unexpected exposure when Madonna used clips from it during her Drowned World Tour in 2001.

His next films were for a more general audience -- “Millennium Actress” (2001), a rather nostalgic saga of an actress’ rise to fame in the last century, and “Tokyo Godfathers” (2003), a kind of “Three Men and a Baby” among the Tokyo homeless (with one of the men being a transvestite and another being a runaway girl).

“Paprika,” which opens Friday, returns to adult themes and not necessarily because of violence or nudity, although there’s a bit of that. It’s adult because of subject matter -- the device Kon mentioned, called the DC Mini, is meant to help schizophrenics by allowing therapists to enter their dreams, but it has been stolen from the Foundation for Psychiatric Research. The lab chief puts the heat on Dr. Atsuko Chiba and her team and calls upon the expertise of a detective friend.

Ultra-cool and calm Chiba has an alter ego -- Paprika, the perky redhead who slips into people’s dreams to help them. Now whoever has stolen the DC Mini is not just traipsing into people’s subconscious and messing with their minds, he’s messing with reality itself. Nightmares occur in the daytime, identities become blurred. It’s the kind of dark vision that has made Kon known as one of anime’s true auteurs, directing from his own scripts and doing much of the drawing as well.

It took 2 1/2 years to make “Paprika.” Kon, with Seishi Minakami, simplified the original story, cut down the psychological details and added a riotous parade sequence. This parade, which begins to intrude into every character’s dream, and then into reality itself (or not), is populated with objects thrown out by modern society, says Kon. There are household appliances, traditional dolls and figures (the ubiquitous daruma wish dolls and the white cat, often found in Japanese restaurants, among them), even the Statue of Liberty (although the director says the latter was inspired by what he saw on the facades of by-the-hour love hotels, not the figure in New York Harbor).

Like other anime directors, he does research by collecting photographs -- of architecture, objects he wants to include and, for “Paprika,” strange theme parks. “During the Bubble era, a lot of theme parks got built,” Kon says, “and now they’re abandoned and have fallen into ruin.” The abandoned theme park is one of the places the characters keep visiting in their dreams.

For the music, he enlisted Susumu Hirasawa, an early proponent of Japanese technopop who worked with him on “Millennium Actress.” Hirasawa skims the gamut of musical genres to create the shifting mood of Kon’s scenes, including a hallucinatory mixture of voice (sometimes yodeling) with a J-pop beat and orchestral effects for the parade scene. The lyrics to that song contain the refrain, “Now your shadow procreates as if the ground is being smothered. / The parade of lunacy is coming, and it is in your name.”

“The parade is frightening and, at the same time, it’s wonderful,” says Kon. “It makes you sick, yet it’s colorful and beautiful too. I have both kinds of dreams, sometimes frightening, sometimes wonderful.”

Did he see this parade in his own dreams?

Kon laughs. “I’m not a mentally ill person, I don’t have that kind of dream.” Then he adds, “If I could have those kinds of dreams, the making of ‘Paprika’ would have been a lot easier.”