In his 1986 analysis of Foucault, philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1988) asks what the struggle for modern subjectivity might look like given that the subject must resist, on the one hand, the impulse to individualize themselves by exerting power over others and, on the other hand, the attraction of conforming to a single recognized and fixed identity. Twenty years later, the same question would be explored in Paprika (2006), an animated film directed by Japanese animation director Kon Satoshi and produced by Madhouse. This text argues that animation represents the struggle for subjectivity that Deleuze articulates. While the plasmatic nature of animation may not in itself be liberating, the form is defined by this struggle, both onscreen in the form of its characters and offscreen by the animator. In turn, animation allows us to explore the tensions between autonomy and automation that we must all negotiate in modern life.
The animation centers on the main character Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist who uses a newly invented device called the DC Mini to observe her patients’ dreams and provide psychotherapy under the guise of her alter ego, Paprika. When the DC Mini is stolen and used to trap the collective unconscious of Atsuko’s colleagues during a violent and surreal parade, she enters the increasingly unstable dream as Paprika to recover the device. At the animated film’s climax, Paprika is captured by one of the thieves, Dr. Morio Osanai, and imprisoned in a room filled with display cases containing preserved butterflies. Osanai pins Paprika to a wooden table in the center of the room and plunges his hand into her body at the groin. The flesh immediately reforms around Osanai’s wrist like gelatin, attempting to become whole once more, even as Paprika screams in agony. Under Osanai’s hand, Paprika’s body becomes elastic and pliable, a rubbery exterior that Osanai tears apart to expose at its core Atsuko’s nude, unconscious form. See figure 1.
Here we see that Paprika is not only animated, in the sense that she was drawn into existence, but that she is imbued with animatedness, a term Sianne Ngai (2005: 94) uses to describe the “exaggerated emotional expressiveness” and physical malleability that marks a subject’s racialized body as requiring external control. We can think of animatedness as an extension of Sergei Eisenstein’s (2017: 32) conception of the plasmatic, which has come to represent, in part, animation’s capacity for visual metamorphosis—its “freedom from ossification” and “ability to assume dynamically any form”. Ngai (2005: 100) complicates this interpretation of the plasmatic by drawing our attention to the ways in which animated bodies are restricted, made obedient, by the animator’s guiding hand.
In this sense, animatedness allows characters like Paprika to move across planes and between forms, but it also renders their bodies vulnerable to external control, calling into question whether freedom from a single, ossified form is necessarily liberating if, as in Paprika’s case, one’s subjecthood is restricted to the level of a body one does not fully possess (Ngai 2005). Like the sensuous flicker of a flame, the capacity of animation to defamiliarize and even unmake forms, “turning subjects into objects, objects into subjects,” as Donna Kornhaber (2019: 16) puts it, can evacuate meaning as well as expand it.
In his yearning to “manipulate people with power” gained in a dream that is not his own, Osanai represents the first form of subjection Deleuze (1998: 106) describes: the desire to individualize oneself “on the basis of constraints of power”. The second form of subjection, in which the subject is driven to assume “a known and recognized identity” that fixes their position in modern culture, is personified by Paprika. She is essentially a form of kyarakutā bijinesu, or character business, an advertising technique that emerged in 1990s Japan in which “cute characters are appropriated as symbols for personal, corporate, group, and national identity” (Allison 2006). Whereas Atsuko has pale skin, jet hair pulled back in a bun, and narrow, skeptical eyes, Paprika is depicted with tan, freckled skin, a mahogany bob, and a wide, childlike gaze. She is “the ‘character brand’ of Atsuko,” a product designed to fulfill a Western ideal of cute girlishness that makes Atsuko more approachable to her male patients (Cabrera Torrecilla 2019: sec. 4).[1] Though Paprika sometimes appears autonomous, at other times she functions as an instrument automatized both by the animators and the male characters.
Yet, in the act of unmaking Paprika’s body, Osanai too is stripped of his autonomy—like an animator working within an industrialized studio, whose labor and creative expression are as tightly controlled as the characters they make move, Osanai’s efforts to animate Paprika are regulated by his employer, Chairman Inui (Ngai 2005). As Osanai pulls Atsuko’s body out of the shell that was Paprika, the Chairman’s head bursts out of the side of Osanai’s face, transforming his hand on Atsuko’s neck into a strangling vine. The two wrestle fruitlessly for control of Osanai’s body until Osanai escapes by bursting into a swarm of butterflies—a literal interpretation of Deleuze’s conclusion that “the struggle for [modern] subjectivity presents itself as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis” (1988: 106). This visual transformation does not necessarily liberate Osanai from Inui’s influence, in the same way that the plasmatic does not inevitably free animated characters “from the shackles of logic” as Eisenstein envisioned (2017: 35). However, it does allow Osanai to struggle, to resist alterity, rather than allow his body to be manipulated against his will.
Atusko’s ability to change forms, to morph into the genre-defying Paprika, proves integral to her own struggle for subjectivity. At the film’s close, Atsuko admits to the sexual desire she had repressed and compartmentalized through Paprika, and the two rejoin into one. She embraces within herself contradiction and multiplicity—the parts of herself that do not conform to a single, fixed identity—and in doing so, she gains the power to defeat Chairman Inui by consuming the dream itself.
[1] Giannalberto Bendazzi (2016) has rightly argued that American audiences often perceive characters in Japanese animation as looking “American/Caucasian/Western” because Japanese animation has historically been dubbed over and recontextualized when imported to the United States, stripping it of original language and culture. However, given the film’s larger commentary on consumerism and cinematic conventions, I am more inclined to read Paprika’s appearance as a reflection of the influence postwar Hollywood films had on Japanese culture and beauty standards.
References
Allison, Anne. “Millennial Japan: Intimate Alienation and New Age Intimacies.” Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. University of California Press, 2006.
Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Animation: A World History: Volume II: The Birth of a Style: The Three Markets. Routledge, 2016.
Cabrera Torrecilla, L. Angélica. “Allegories of Japanese Women in Paprika by Tsutsui Yasutaka and Kon Satoshi.” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2019, https://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol19/iss3/torrecilla.html. Accessed 28 Dec. 2021.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Eisenstein, Sergei. On Disney. Edited by Jay Leyda; translated by Alan Upchurch. Seagull Books, 2017.
Kornhaber, Donna. Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film. The University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Paprika. Directed by Kon Satoshi, Madhouse, 2006.
Cailin Flannery Roles is a PhD candidate in the English department at Northeastern University, where they are currently working on a dissertation that explores the relationship between animation and the laboring body in modernity. Their fields of study include animated film and comics, cultural studies, and queer theory. Their writing can also be read in Texas Studies in Literature and Language and Digital Humanities Quarterly.