Paranoia Agent

• 1. Bat Boy of Musashino

  ›

  In Paranoia Agent, a Japanese anime television series created by director Satoshi Kon, none of the victims can recall the face of the boy who attacks strangers in Musashino, Tokyo. Each of them remembers the same three things. Golden inline skates. A baseball cap. A bent golden baseball bat. He becomes known as Lil' Slugger, the English equivalent of Shōnen Bat, which translates to Bat Boy. The studio Madhouse produced the series, and it follows a social phenomenon rather than a single crime. The story relays between a large cast of people touched by the attacks, mostly victims and the detectives assigned to catch him. Each time a new character takes the focus, the series reveals what that person hides, and a little more about the attacker. Who is the boy on the skates, and is he a boy at all? What are the people he strikes keeping secret? And what does a whole city do with a fear that nobody can see clearly?

  256

• 2. Pressure and Doubt

  ›

  As she walks home one night, Tsukiko Sagi is attacked by an elementary school boy on inline skates. She is a shy character designer, and she is under pressure. She created Maromi, a pink dog who became immensely popular, and now she is expected to repeat that success. Maromi has gathered a huge following among the public. Inside the story, the pink puppy also serves as Tsukiko's conscience and her imaginary friend.

  Two police detectives, Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwa, are assigned to the case. At first they suspect that Tsukiko is lying about the attack. That doubt ends when word arrives of a second victim. After that, the attacker is blamed for a series of street assaults in Tokyo.

  Keiichi Ikari, the chief detective, is a tough middle-aged man who has no faith in the supernatural. His wife is critically ill. Mitsuhiro Maniwa works beside him and is his opposite in temperament. Where Ikari dismisses the strange, Maniwa is drawn to it, and he often pushes himself closer to insanity in order to solve the case.

  Ikari's wife has her own encounter with the bat. She wants to live, she stays faithful to her husband, and when Lil' Slugger appears before her she fights him off with her own willpower. She later dies of a heart attack. Before that, she manages to free Keiichi from a delusional world.

  Meanwhile, the bat was already finding its next target, a gossip journalist who came to question Tsukiko for his next article.

  225

• 3. Schoolyard Suspicions

  ›

  The gossip journalist who becomes the second victim was in debt long before he met Lil' Slugger. He caused a traffic accident that involved the Mysterious Old Man, and now he pays the hospital bills as consolation to the old man's son. He also has a talent for impressions. He shows it off to Tsukiko by flawlessly mimicking her co-workers.

  The Mysterious Old Man himself is a senile hospital patient with an uncanny gift. He can predict and identify all of Lil' Slugger's victims.

  Near the scene of the original attacks lives Yūichi Taira, a cool-natured and narcissistic elementary school student. He is popular for his intelligence and athleticism. Then his own skates and cap match the culprit's description, and he becomes the subject of ostracism.

  Shōgo Ushiyama arrives at Yūichi's school as a transfer student. On the advice of his school counselor, he decides to assert himself positively by running for school president. He is a kindhearted youth who tries to better himself by being positive and helpful whenever he can. Yūichi sees something else. He believes Shōgo is a two-faced schemer who is attacking Yūichi's reputation to boost his own popularity, and he resents Shōgo for stealing that popularity.

  Shōgo is attacked on his way home from school by an imposter of Lil' Slugger. After that, Yūichi shuts himself in his room and sinks into a delusional, paranoid state. He then becomes the third victim.

  Yūichi's tutor, Harumi Chōno, is the person he trusts most, and she would become the fourth to fall.

  2

• 4. Double Lives

  ›

  Harumi Chōno, an office lady, shares her life with an alternate personality named Maria, who works as a prostitute. The two communicate through an answering machine. Harumi becomes engaged to her superior, Akihiko Kase, and then marries him. She repeatedly tries to repress Maria, and every attempt proves futile. At the height of that conflict, she becomes the fourth victim.

  One of Maria's regular customers is Masami Hirukawa, a corrupt police chief. He watches his own daughter, Taeko, through a hidden surveillance camera. He plans a new house for his family and pays for it with illegally obtained money. When an attempt is made on his life, he manages to arrest a Lil' Slugger imposter.

  A yakuza affiliated with Masami has a sadistic lackey named Makabe. Makabe tries to collect 2,000,000 yen from Masami as a token of congratulations for the yakuza's engagement. When Masami cannot pay by the deadline, Makabe raises the debt to 5,000,000 yen. Then a typhoon brings a landslide, and the new house is destroyed. Masami becomes the fifth victim.

  Taeko is his only daughter, and she admires him deeply. After she discovers her father's disgusting actions, she becomes the sixth victim and contracts amnesia from the attack.

  The seventh victim is a middle schooler who believes he is a holy warrior. In fact he is a lunatic who cannot tell reality from his fantasies. He is arrested on suspicion of being behind the attacks, but he confesses that the only people he attacked were Shōgo and Masami. Soon afterward he is killed by the real Lil' Slugger.

  That word, real, is the hardest one in the series, because the attacker is not what he first appears to be.

  2

• 5. Rumour and Truth

  ›

  Lil' Slugger is not human. He appears to be a sixth-grade elementary student, but he is a mysterious, elusive entity who grows stronger on rumour and speculation. He appears before people who have been mentally pushed into a corner and strikes them with his bat. Every retelling of the story feeds him.

  At the end of the series, the origin comes out. Tsukiko Sagi created him without knowing it. Maromi was modeled on a real dog she owned when she was young. The dog wandered away from her and was hit by a car and killed. Tsukiko did not want to upset her father, so she claimed that a boy on roller blades carrying a bat had killed the dog. That invented boy later manifested as Lil' Slugger. She imagined him to avoid blame for her dog's death.

  The pink dog also gets a television show inside the story. Mellow Maromi is an anime that features Maromi as its main character. Its two most prominent staff members are the production managers, Saruta and Oda. Saruta is a clumsy slacker who constantly causes problems for the production. Oda is a short-tempered man who frequently assaults and humiliates Saruta whenever he makes a mistake. The work environment grows highly stressful, and the two gradually become unhinged.

  After Oda angrily fires him, Saruta beats Oda to death. He takes the finished copy of the first episode and plans to drive it to the studio. Lil' Slugger suddenly appears in the back of his car and beats him to death. Saruta's corpse is later found outside the network station.

  222

• 6. Herons and Frogs

  ›

  Many characters in Paranoia Agent are referred to with animal names. This happens especially in each Prophetic Vision, a segment at the end of every episode that previews the next. It also happens in the episode The Holy Warrior, where some characters are depicted as animal-like creatures.

  In many cases the Japanese names translate directly into the animal. Sagi means heron, which is the first syllable of Tsukiko's surname. Kawazu is an archaic term for frog. Ushi means cow, and it opens the name Ushiyama. Hiru means leech, and it opens the name Hirukawa. Tai means sea bream or red snapper.

  Chō means butterfly, and it begins the name Chōno. The related word chō-cho can also mean butterfly, which possibly alludes to Harumi's split personality. The list ends with kamome, the Japanese word for seagull.

  32

• 7. Leftover Ideas

  ›

  Before Paranoia Agent, Satoshi Kon directed three films: Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers. While making them, he built up an abundance of unused ideas for stories and arrangements. He thought the ideas were good, but none of them fit into any of his projects. Not wanting to waste the material, he decided to recycle it into a dynamic television series where his experimental ideas could be used.

  The format was also a matter of temperament. Kon explained that a theatrical film kept him working for two and a half years, always in the same mood and with the same method. He wanted something more flexible, a way "to realize instantly what flashes across my mind." He was also aiming for a sort of entertaining variation, so he chose a television series.

  Susumu Hirasawa, a Japanese electronica pioneer, composed the music. He also performs both the opening theme and the ending theme.

  The series aired on Japan's Wowow from the 3rd of February to the 18th of May 2004.

  4519

• 8. Reception and Reach

  ›

  Rotten Tomatoes gives Paranoia Agent a rare approval rating of 100%, based on 13 critic reviews, with an average rating of 7.7 out of 10. The site's critical consensus calls it "a disturbing meditation on individual and societal anxiety." In 2004, the series was one of the Jury Recommended Works in the Animation Division at the 8th Japan Media Arts Festival.

  Charles Solomon of NPR warned that viewers who expect a straightforward narrative may be frustrated. He still called it a disturbing, highly original work from a talented filmmaker. His NPR colleague John Powers called it "one of the best and strangest programs I have ever seen." Powers said Kon exposes the sadness and pain hidden beneath the modern embrace of cute things.

  Not every verdict was as warm. Empire awarded three out of five stars, and IGN gave the first three episodes 7 out of 10. IGN compared the series to the work of David Lynch but called the animation "downright primitive in places." Anime News Network's James Beckett gave it an A and wrote that the questions it raises matter more than the answers. Paste ranked it the 14th best anime series of all time and compared it to Kon's Paprika and Perfect Blue. Jean-Luc Bouchard of BuzzFeed praised it as a depiction of depression.

  Geneon Entertainment licensed the series in North America and released it on four DVDs between the 26th of October 2004 and the 10th of May 2005. A UMD version of Volume 1 followed on the 10th of October 2005. Madman Entertainment released it in Australia, and MVM Films distributes it in the UK.

  An English dub began airing on Adult Swim in the United States on the 29th of May 2005, with an encore beginning on the 6th of June 2006. In Canada, G4TechTV began a run on its Anime Current block on the 27th of July 2007. In 2008, the series was shown theatrically at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of a retrospective of Kon's films.

  On the 3rd of February 2020, Funimation announced it had licensed the series for streaming. On the 15th of April 2020, Adult Swim rebroadcast the English dub on its Toonami block for the first time in over a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic had halted new episodes for half of the programs. A Blu-ray collection arrived on the 13th of October 2020 in SteelBook packaging as a Best Buy exclusive. A general Blu-ray release followed on the 15th of December 2020.

  In December 2009, cult-film director Takashi Shimizu announced plans for a film adaptation. Those plans fell through, and no film was ever made. Paranoia Agent remains the 13 episodes that Kon and Madhouse delivered.

  1819202225