All Critics (88)
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Top Critics (28)
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Fresh (77)
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Rotten (15)
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DVD (12)
With a conventional invade-dreams/bend-reality plot, it's a bit of a bore.
You could sit through the film two or three times to nail down the details of the story, but the film isn't interesting enough to warrant a second look.
Is it sci-fi? Fantasy? Idiocy? Mostly it's a droning mess -- pretty to look at but confounding to the point where you just don't care any more.
Especially for fans who understand how movies are put together, Paprika grabs you from the get-go in a series of flowing images and transitions that follow the skewed logic of a dream, jumping from a three-ring circus to a swinging jungle vine.
As a showcase of the limitless power of the imagination, Paprika never fails to delight the eye and engage the mind. We are never sure exactly whom we should be cheering for, or even if we're rooting for real characters or their avatars.
We're so used to current cautious commercial formulas, it comes as an enjoyable shock to see something like Satoshi Kon's Japanese film, Paprika, which reminds us that with animation, almost anything you can imagine can be represented.
Reality and fantasy leak into each other in short-circuiting jolts in Kon's cosmos
Though it's not quite up there with the cream of anime feature films, Paprika is a distinctive, quality addition to the genre.
Plays like the end and the beginning of Japanese cinema: it contradicts itself and contains multitudes.
A mind-blowing sci-fi thriller that stands as one of the best animated films of the year.
Paprika is one weird film.
The boundaries between the material world and the psychic world blur in Satoshi Kon's nightmare thriller about, in the words of the film itself, mental terrorism.
When compared to American animation, with its reliance on anthropomorphized animals and lame pop culture references, Paprika is like a pen and ink 2001.
The animation shows brilliant imagination by the filmmakers.
Its visual collision of mindscapes, films within films and dreams within dreams cascade into a dizzying rush that easily washes away the humdrum dialogue and somewhat sketchy plot.
Paprika fills me with such overwhelming enthusiasm as to leave me gibbering.
Solely as a magical mystery tour of sights, sounds and surrealism, however, it's a unique animated blast to the senses.
Offers both eye candy and mind candy -- it's a thoughtful visual treat.
Watching anime is like hearing a foreign language in which you are fluent but not native: However much you believe you understand, you can never be sure you totally get it.
Manages to create a comfort zone for both Tarzan and Freud.
Simply the most refreshing piece of cinema I've seen this year.
Paprika, while certainly not suitable for kids, manages to capture the childlike, helter-skelter chaos and curiosity of the human mind better than any other animated film.
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