Paprika

A device called the DC Mini allows therapists to enter their patients' dreams and work from the inside. When one is stolen, the boundary between dreaming and waking begins to fail: a parade of refrigerators and torii gates and festival figures marching through the streets of Tokyo, the unconscious surfacing through the pavement of the city in broad daylight.

Satoshi Kon's final completed film, 2006. Christopher Nolan watched it before making Inception. The debt is not acknowledged and it is visible in every frame involving a shared dreamspace and a reality that cannot be trusted. Paprika is doing something Inception is not: it is not interested in the mechanics of the dream as a heist environment. It is interested in what desire looks like when the unconscious is given a direct line to the surface, what a person reveals when the filter is removed.

The visual invention is the densest of Kon's career. The parade sequence alone. Ninety minutes of the most alive animation the medium produced in the 2000s, from a director who died in 2010 at forty-six with one film unfinished and a note left for his fans that said: I am going ahead of you. What he completed is preserved here. It is more than enough and not enough at all.