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Star Scholar Contribution

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2011): Reassessing Anime

Playing the Kon Trick: Between Dates, Dimensions and Daring in the films of Satoshi Kon

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14288/cinephile.v7i1.197974
Submitted
March 17, 2023
Published
2011-03-01

Abstract

When Satoshi Kon tragically passed away in the Summer of 2010, anime lost one of its true auteurs, and animation, one of the most playful exponents of the way the animated form can re-define space, time and sensibility, both through its characters and environments, and its audiences. Kon’s films, Perfect Blue (1998), Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003) and Paprika (2006), as well as his screenplay for Memories (1995) all signal a preoccupation with how identity is bound up with the perception of temporal order, spatial laws and configurations, and how any one person might ‘evidence’ their presence and influence in the material world.