[Source: AICN.COM] The sad new is coming out of Studio Madhouse that anime director Satoshi Kon has passed away at age 47.
His work included
Perfect Blue - 1998
Millennium Actress - 2001
Tokyo Godfathers - 2003
Paranoia Agent - 2004
Paprika - 2006
Perfect Blue - 1998
Millennium Actress - 2001
Tokyo Godfathers - 2003
Paranoia Agent - 2004
Paprika - 2006
And the Good Morning short for the Anime*Kuri 15 compendium.
He had been working on children's feature Dream Machine.
I remember when Satoshi Kon's pyscho-thriller Perfect Blue hit the
US. The to be revered director's initial calling card was actually
divisive. Many anime fans laughed at and rejected it. Didn't like its
lost lead. Snickered at its depiction of proto-blogging. However, it
wasn't long before Kon became one of the paramount names in anime being
produced for older audiences. Anime might be a medium of artistic
possibilities, but given its economics, more often than not, it turns
out works for children and specialized audiences. A thinking artist
like Satoshi Kon producing works as tricky as Kon's was truly special.
From a look at his career, written in response to Andrew Osmond's Satoshi Kon: the Illusionist
In the last decade, movies and video games have made deep incursions into territory that was once the domain of anime and animation in general. There were images that were tremendously difficult to realize in live action and impossible in games, but available to animation. CG and improved game hardware have flipped the script. As a consequence, whole genres of anime have lost their importance. Who wants to sit back and watch elves and dragons fantasy anime, when games often offer a comparable visual experience, while allowing a player to participate.
Yet, an area in which anime/animation can still
assert an advantage is narratives in which the fantastic is blurred with
the objective. Leveraging animation's ability for a director to erase
boundaries and exercise nuanced control of the entire image, Kon is the
master at this. There's the world as it theoretically is. Then, there is
the world as it is reflected in media. Then, the world as it is
interpreted by the human mind... subdivisible into conscious and
subconscious, rational and irrational. In Kon's anime, these
distinctions all collapse in on each other.
Often starting with the foundation of a live
action associated genre, whether it is Hitchcockian thriller (Perfect
Blue), a Christmas story (Tokyo Godfathers) or life in retrospect drama
(Millennium Actress), Kon convolutes it with the mind's paradoxes,
contradictions and chambers of mirrors. His subjects project their
interpretations out onto the world, at times seeing themselves as
fantastic beings, dancing through the air or skipping through a city's
neon signage. And yet, those interpretations are shaped by pressure from
those around as well as a saturation of media influence. Rather than
mechanistic stories, Kon's are shaped into knotted feedback loops.
As a fan of anime and animation in general, this lose is deeply felt.
Beyond technical considerations, business concerns makes anime a
difficult medium to work in. Creators able to produce works like Kon's
have been and will continue to be rare. You probably will not see many
replicating works like Kon's. Anime had its boom and contraction of the
00's, but I'd argue that it turned out to be great decade for works for
adults, in large part thanks to the unforgettable contribution of
Satoshi Kon.
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