Fun & Games

Over The Edge Page 18

by Kathleen de Vere |

Help! My ‘id’ is trying to kill
me!

Perfect blue is a slick psy-
chological thriller that is quite
unlike a lot of the other anime
movies out today. There are
no robots, explosions or gun
toting vigilante bounty
hunters. It brings up some
serious questions about how
much is the self; how much is
simply just a public persona,
and what would happen if that
persona decided it didn’t want
to vanish from public view.

It follows the story of pop
idol Mima Kirigoe who sings
in a trio called Cham. In Japan

BY BRAD KIRKLAND

idol singers like Mima and her
fellow Cham members are a
dime a dozen, and usually get
about 15 minutes of fame and
a few devoted followers.
Mima decides to forgo career
singing bubblegum songs in
amusement parks and takes
a role as an actress on the T.V
drama ‘Double Bind’. To gain
professional respect and lose
her sugary cute pop idol
image she consents to doing
a rape scene in the T.V show
and soon after her grip on
reality begins to slip. She
begins to see her former self -
a picture perfect pop idol
appear in mirrors, in the com-
puter screen and eventually

©

taunting her in real life -
always bouncing along per-
fectly in her doll like get up.
Mima discovers an_ internet
Website called ‘mima’s room’
that tracks her exploits so
accurately that she begins to
believe that if the Website
says she goes shopping, then
she really has gone shopping.
Soon real life begins to blur
around the edges as the plot
of the T.V show begins to mir-
ror her own life, as the people
that have helped her to
change her image drop dead
one by one, with increasing
violence every time. By the
end of the movie, Mima can-
not even distinguish between

Double Feature

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what she is supposed to be
acting, and what is really hap-
pening to her.

Throughout the movie the
viewer is kept wondering if
Mima is simply cracking up
from the strain of her new
career, or if there really is
someone out to get her. This
film is not only a great thriller,
it’s a look into the Japanese
media culture and the pop idol
singer role, something
unknown as yet in North
America but seemingly on it’s

February 26, 2001

way (Brittany Spears any-
body?).

For it’s intelligence and
its impressive animation,
which only adds to the erie
disjointed feeling of the

movie. Perfect Blue is a must
see for anyone, not just a fan
of anime, so it gets 4 and a
half stampeding moose out of
5.

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