Perfect Blue

4.50
    Perfect Blue
    1998

    Synopsis

    Encouraged by her managers, rising pop star Mima takes on a recurring role on a popular TV show, when suddenly her handlers and collaborators begin turning up murdered.

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    Cast

    • Junko IwaoMima Kirigoe (voice)
    • Rica MatsumotoRumi (voice)
    • Shiho NiiyamaRei (voice)
    • Masaaki OkuraMamoru Uchida (voice)
    • Shinpachi TsujiTadokoro (voice)
    • Emiko FurukawaYukiko (voice)
    • Yosuke AkimotoTejima (voice)
    • Yoku ShioyaTakao Shibuya (voice)
    • Hideyuki HoriSakuragi (voice)
    • Emi ShinoharaEri Ochiai (voice)

    Recommendations

    • 80

      Empire

      Strange, stylish and intelligent, this is a rare anime film that delivers on its Eastern promise.
    • 75

      San Francisco Chronicle

      Perfect Blue manages, through animation, to take the thriller, media fascination, psychological insight and pop culture and stand them all on their heads.
    • 75

      Slant Magazine

      Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a prescient vision of a modern world defined by media oversaturation and social media validation.
    • 67

      Austin Chronicle

      Contemporary adult themes that resonate as much as those in Perfect Blue (stalking, the cult of celebrity) have become increasingly rare in this animated genre better known for tentacled demons and cute forest sprites; it's refreshing to be reminded that not everything in anime need feature that lovable scamp Pikachu, either.
    • 67

      The A.V. Club

      With its fluidly changeable surfaces, animation may be the ideal medium for confronting the public's growing uncertainty with reality, but Perfect Blue is a missed opportunity, too shallow and exploitative to be taken seriously.
    • 63

      San Francisco Examiner

      The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.
    • 60

      Chicago Reader

      This engrossing animated thriller (2000) somehow displays realist gore, nudity, and sexual violence in a tone not too far from that of a children’s adventure; its innocence stems in part from the convincing naivete of the heroine.
    • 60

      Variety

      Forsaking the usual anime fantasy terrain for a straight suspense plot that might easily have been executed in live-action form, director Satoshi Kon's debut pic, "Perfect Blue," is a psychological thriller that intrigues without quite hitting the bull's-eye.

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