The girl of your dreams -- and his dreams, and her dreams -- the punkish heroine of Satoshi Kon's "Paprika" is a double-agent-provocateur in a shape-shifting movie of marvelous, baffling complexities. It's a long way from the more safely beautiful work of that Japanese Walt Disney, Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away"). And it is also anime decidely for adults: Among "Paprika's" thriller aspects, noirish angst and futuristic action, nothing is ever what it appears. Dreams intrude on dreams. Surfaces of reality fold over each other, like the petals on an origami chrysanthemum.
Kon's previous feature, "Tokyo Godfathers" (he has made four now as a director), was narratively complicated, but the viewer was permitted to dwell on a single plane of perception. In Kon's hallucinogenic "Paprika," a device known as the DC-Mini, intended for use in psychotherapy, has been stolen, enabling the ill-intentioned thieves to intrude upon dreamers and trap them in their dreams.
An obvious precursor to all this is the considerably coarser "A Nightmare on Elm Street," in which people were murdered while they slept. But "Paprika" is far closer in tone and intent to Chris Marker's landmark "La Jetee," or its mutant stepchild, "12 Monkeys": The sense of having no feet on the ground is not limited to the characters. The audience too is careening about, strapped in at a demented carnival where realities bang together like bumper cars.
