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Can you describe the style and techniques of storytelling that Kon uses in Paprika? What do you see as the goal of this kind of storytelling? What are the pros and cons of it?
Kon uses the technique of full immersion in Paprika. The goal of this kind of storytelling is to suck the viewer into the story. To accomplish this, Kon merges reality with the dream world so the viewer, just like the characters, does not know what is real and what is a dream. This gives the viewer a unique experience while watching. It makes them feel as though they are in the story along with the characters. While this does make for a very good and immersive viewing experience, it also makes the story hard to follow. Kon makes the movie like a dream, and trying to follow a dream without being in it is very hard to do. It makes so one of the only ways to truly understand the film is to not focus too much on any one aspect.
Kon uses a linear yet nonsequential storytelling style to tell this story. This means that though things happen one after another (seemingly) chronologically, things don’t make logical chronological sense by our standards of reason (I believe the term for this random jumping around in comics is called nonsequitor). This type of method is extremely effective for portraying a dream, and like Mason said, immersing us in that dream. For example, when the hospital staff went crazy and walked around spouting crap, we could reason why that had started, but what they were doing made no sense. A con of this is that, well, it makes no sense a lot of the time if you’re trying hard to logically reason things out. However, it’s a great method for hiding and revealing clues in this sort of mystery story.
As usual, Kon fills the story with non-linear narrations. Different yet similar to his conventional approach, Kon in Paprika not only intersperses the reality with dreams, but constructs a parallel of different layers of dreams. The function of such non-linear style of narration is to imitate the mechanism of dreams: people dream in a non-linear and discontinuous fashion. In such way, Kon is able to bring the audience in the context of dreams, so that he can better convey his idea of dreams and reality and that of how to distinguish dreams and reality to the audience.
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