Paranoia Agent
Do you like psychological genres, where a line between reality and fantasy is blurred? Do you enjoy episodic series that slowly completes the whole picture of the main plot, giving you some form of a message in the end? If you’re not afraid of disturbing scenes also revolving around abuse, bullying or even a murder, you should give this noteworthy series a chance.
It is the only series directed by Satoshi Kon, a director and character designer of movies like Paprika, Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers or Millenium Actress. It was produced by Madhouse (Hunter x Hunter, One Punch Man, Death Note,…) and aired in spring 2004. The series is not an addaptation, but actually an original work of Satoshi Kon. The soundtrack was composed by Susumu Hirasawa also known for OST of Berserk series or Paprika movie.
And what is it about? Let’s check it out…
Plot
Everything starts with Tsukiko Sagi, a character designer who created a cute dog-like character Marumi-chan, which slowly turned into a very popular merchandise all around Japan. Although it might seem, she leads a prosperous life full of glory, reality is much more complicated. She actually struggles in work trying to come up with other ideas of the same quality as Marumi, while her colegues envy her fame and despise her because of it. Her stressful life builds up till the day Tsukiko is attacked by a mysterious boy on inline skates, who stroke her with a bent baseball bat and made her incapable of working, which solved her problems somehow. The boy is named Shounen Bat (Lil‘ Slugger in dub) and his attacks slowly become a common thing in Japanese mass media. Each episode show us a piece of life of different characters, who struggles to live normally and later come in contact with this boy personally or through rumours.
Characters
Each episode tells us about an individual life struggles of different characters. You get to know how life is like for a prostitude with split personality, for detectives solving the case of Shounen Batto, for a student similar to Shounen Batto, for scared housewifes who spread rumours and so on. Each character’s age and profession varies, so we can find our own story that could be relatable to our problems or life situations. Interesting is that there are some patterns that can be noticed in each of those stories and that is a varied domonstration of reality escape and what paranoia and mass media can turn people into. Each of the characters tries to avoid their problems by creating their own world, while believing in it rather than accepting the life as it is. The reality escape often revolves around Shounen Batto, who solves character’s problems in a way, mysteriously showing up when they need him the most. This example presents us how the escape might be quite frequent and common thing for many people and sometimes it might even seem it’s the only solution of the problem itself. Dynamics among characters, their interactions and findings nicely completes the whole picture of the Shounen Batto mystery, uncovering his origin piece by piece.
Art
I personally think that art was very well done, even though it’s 16 years old work, and playful. It actually varied and depended on each character’s point of view. Imagination of sweet memories were presented in light, dreamy colours. The fantasy about historical Japan, which was known by the particular character from movies and theatres, was actually in paper 2D format with stage sets and so on. Fascinating was that somehow cute things could turn to be quite disturbing, for example the mentioned character designer Tsukiko Sagi liked to talk with her plush toy of Marumi-chan, end even though it was just a toy, it also moved in a bizzare, clumsy, unnatural way, bringing discomfort to a viewer. Also the appearence of Marumi character, sometimes only in a form of a hint - appearence in television, on a person wearing a bag with it etc. - nicely connected each episode of Paranoia Agent world, where Marumi grew to be maybe too popular, nearly worshiped entity. And to finish my example listing, I admired how the emotions were accuratelly expressed, making the characters more human and relatable.
Music
The author of the sountrack, as I’ve already mentioned, was Susumu Hirasawa. His work is rather characteristic, yet complicated. He composes very catchy, sometimes chilling, scary, tense or dreamy, out of the world songs, but on the other hand energetic, parade-like music, in some cases „as if you’re losing your mind“ ones too. He often experiments with genres, and that can be also heard in Paranoia agent. We can listen to repetitive electronic music filled with tension, strumming on our nerves, we can hear playfull, children music for example in its ending „White Hill – Maromi's Theme“ or parade-like song nicely describing the feeling of loosing your mind (life) in the opening song „Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen“. If I’d try to generalize it somehow for the series, in a way it’s similar to electronic or experimental rock, he uses syntetizers, electronic keyboard, guitar, lazer harp, programming etc. making quite a complicated collage of sounds. But overal quite fitting for the series.
Final words
I wouldn’t recommend it to children or people who mind disturbing themes like abuse, bullying, murder. It’s not really a bloody series, but it sure brings discomfort and might be a bad choice in some cases. Sometimes it may seem like it’s not making any sense, so if you’re not a fan of a difficult/abstract story telling, you might be dissapointed. On the other hand, if you’re interested in not so easy to decipher stories and in psychological genres where you can watch how individuals behave according to the situation and try to solve their struggles, sometimes even evolve into a completely different character, it’s the right choice for you.
Spoiler – little hidden message of my understanding
It is often hard to recognize what is real and what's not and it’s quite difficult for a viewer to distinguish what is what and be certain about it. But this uncertain definiton also demonstrates us that fantasy is an important part of our mundane life and drawing a straight line in between is not possible. What’s the message then?
Paranoia originates in our imagination. Imagination feeds the rumours and creates something monseterous, making it harder for us to distinguish what is the fact and what is just a hoax. Imagination has no boundaries, neither the number of information that is created and converted by people. In a greater scale, thanks to mass media, the fear of number of possibilitties, „what if“ situations, and thanks to our imagination, the paranoia can grow wild easily. Yet the information we might have gotten at first, may be just an "innocent" but still a false report. That sure is frightening.
Well, that is at least a piece of what I understood from it – fantasy is important part of us, sometimes helping us survive difficult parts of our life, but it can turn into paranoia too (It’s a double edged sword) - but it’s just my personal point of view of course. The human general fear is the unknown afterall.
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