Satoshi Kon

• 1. Introduction

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  When Satoshi Kon died in 2010, the news landed as a shock. He had kept his illness private, and only a short time earlier he had appeared at public events with no visible sign that anything was wrong. Kon was a Japanese film director, animator, screenwriter and manga artist. His films had a habit of making audiences doubt what they were seeing. That is an unusual reputation for a man who trained as a graphic designer. How did a young cartoonist become an assistant to an established manga artist, and then a director with a voice of his own? Why did he insist on drawing his stories instead of filming them? And what became of the film he left unfinished?

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• 2. Apprentice Years

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  Satoshi Kon was born on the 12th of October 1963. Because his father's job was transferred, his schooling from the fourth grade of elementary school through the second year of middle school was based in Sapporo. There he befriended a classmate, Seihō Takizawa, who later became a manga artist. At Hokkaido Kushiro Koryo High School, Kon decided he wanted to be an animator.

  In 1982 Kon entered the Graphic Design course at Musashino Art University. In 1984 he made his debut as a manga artist with a short work called Toriko. It earned a runner-up spot at the 10th Annual Tetsuya Chiba Awards, run by Kodansha's Young Magazine. Soon afterward he found work as an assistant to Katsuhiro Otomo.

  Kon graduated in 1987. In 1990 he produced Kaikisen, a single-volume manga. He also wrote the script for Otomo's live-action film World Apartment Horror.

  Kon's first anime job came in 1991, when he worked as an animator and background designer on Roujin Z, a film Otomo wrote. Around 1992 he took on scriptwriting, layout and background design for Magnetic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto. It was one of three short films in Otomo's omnibus Memories, released in 1995. On that project Kon first adopted "the fusion of fantasy and reality" as the theme of his work.

  In 1993 he was one of five layout artists on Mamoru Oshii's Patlabor 2: The Movie. He also worked on the 1993-1994 OVA series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. He was a key animator on episode 2, and he wrote and storyboarded episode 5.

  Oshii then teamed up with Kon on a manga called Seraphim: Wings of 266,613,336. Oshii wrote it, Kon drew it, and the monthly magazine Animage began serializing it in 1994. As the story went on, the two men's opinions drifted apart. The series went on hiatus and ended unfinished. After that, Kon gave up manga and devoted himself to anime. His work on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had already caught the eye of producer Masao Maruyama, who would soon offer him a film of his own.

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• 3. Directing Years

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  In 1997 Kon began work on his directorial debut, Perfect Blue, adapted from the novel of the same name by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. It was the first Kon film produced by Madhouse. The suspense story centers on a pop idol. Kon was unhappy with the first script drawn from the novel and asked for changes. Takeuchi allowed him to alter anything he liked, provided three elements stayed: "idol," "horror" and "stalker." Sadayuki Murai wrote the screenplay and worked in the idea of a blurred border between the real world and imagination.

  Kon next considered adapting Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1993 novel Paprika. Those plans stalled when Rex Entertainment, the distributor of Perfect Blue, went bankrupt. Coincidentally, Kon's next work would also feature a film studio going bankrupt.

  Millennium Actress reached the public in 2002. It follows a retired actress who mysteriously withdraws from public view at the peak of her career. Its estimated budget of about 120 million yen matched that of Perfect Blue. Even so, it earned greater critical and financial success, along with numerous awards. Murai again wrote the screenplay, joining illusion and reality seamlessly to make what he called a "Trompe-l'œil kind of film." Go Fish Pictures, a DreamWorks affiliate, handled the North American release.

  Tokyo Godfathers was announced in 2003, and Destination Films, affiliated with Sony Pictures, distributed it in North America. Three homeless people in Tokyo find a baby on Christmas Eve and set out to find her parents. With a budget of about 300 million yen, it cost more than Kon's first two films. It dealt with homelessness and abandonment, lightened by a comedic touch. Keiko Nobumoto wrote the screenplay. The production also marked the move from celluloid animation to digital animation.

  In 2004 Kon released Paranoia Agent, a television series of 13 episodes. It returned to the blending of imagination and reality and added further social themes. Kon built it from a pile of unused story ideas that he felt were good but fit none of his projects.

  Paprika was announced in 2006, after taking shape over several years. Its story concerns a new form of psychotherapy that uses dream analysis to treat mental patients. The film was highly successful and won a number of awards. Kon summed up the adaptation by saying that everything except the fundamental story had been changed.

  In 2007 Kon took part in the NHK program Ani*Kuri15 with Ohayō, a one-minute short film broadcast alongside works by Mamoru Oshii, Makoto Shinkai and others. That same year he helped establish the Japanese Animation Creators Association, known as JAniCA, and served as one of its members.

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• 4. Fiction and Reality

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  Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Paranoia Agent and Paprika share one device: the boundary between fiction and reality slowly blurs, and the characters drift back and forth across it. Each work approaches the idea differently, and the idea became the keyword associated with Kon.

  Tokyo Godfathers seems at first to sit outside this pattern. Yet it has its own device, in which the "fiction" of miracles and coincidences keeps arriving in the realistic daily lives of homeless people in Tokyo.

  Kon's character designs and style make his films look as if they are chasing realism. His aim was different. He wanted to show the instant when landscapes and people that look real suddenly reveal themselves to be "fiction" or "pictures." The convincing worlds he had helped build as a staff member on Otomo's and Oshii's films became the tool for that jolt. A world that seems real turns into an unfamiliar one, and the audience loses its footing. According to the source, this is why he insisted on animation over live action.

  Asked why he was drawn to female characters, Kon said they were easier to write. He could not know them the way he knew male characters, so he could "project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe."

  The scholar Susan J. Napier looked at his work up to Tokyo Godfathers. She agreed that performance is the obvious common thread. She found the male gaze to be the more important subject. Napier traced the gaze from a restrictive and negative form in Magnetic Rose and Perfect Blue, to a collaborative one in Millennium Actress. In Tokyo Godfathers she saw a new kind that reveled in uncertainty and illusion.

  Dean DeBlois said that Kon "used the hand-drawn medium to explore social stigmas and the human psyche." DeBlois added that Kon's films "will always occupy a fascinating middle ground between 'cartoons' and the world as we know it."

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• 5. Influences

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  In 2007 Kon said that the music of Susumu Hirasawa was the greatest influence on his expressive style. He had long been a fan, and Millennium Actress was the first Kon film to use Hirasawa as composer. From Hirasawa's attitude toward music and production, Kon took his idea of fractal control of a film, since Hirasawa applied fractal-generating programs to his music. Hirasawa's lyrics also sparked Kon's interest in Jungian psychology. That led him to the writings of Hayao Kawai, Japan's foremost expert on Jungian psychology, who decoded ancient myths and folktales. Kon said every one of his works, from Perfect Blue to the suspended Dreaming Machine, drew on Hirasawa's lyrics and songs.

  As a child, Kon knew the manga and animation of Osamu Tezuka, including Astro Boy, The Jungle Emperor and Princess Knight. In his junior and senior high school years he watched the anime that fans of the day were crazy about. These included Space Battleship Yamato and Heidi, Girl of the Alps from 1974, Future Boy Conan and Galaxy Express 999 from 1978, and Mobile Suit Gundam from 1979.

  Otomo shaped him most among manga artists. Kon's favorite works were Domu: A Child's Dream and AKIRA. He loved Domu so much that he said, if he could turn only one manga he had ever read into a film, it would be that one. The movement in manga that Otomo and others started pushed him to draw manga himself during his high school days. He was struck by the New Wave's way of overwhelming the reader with a story in which nothing in particular happens, centered on a character who could never be the protagonist. Kon said his drawing style came from Otomo. Once in animation, he learned a great deal from animators Hiroyuki Okiura, Toshiyuki Inoue, Takeshi Honda and Masashi Ando, and from art setter Takashi Watabe.

  From the time he started college, Kon watched only live-action films, mostly on video. He made a routine of drawing manga based on the setting, format and direction of the scenes. Ninety percent of those films were American, and he said Hollywood taught him much about his own visual expression. No single film or director shaped him, but the pieces show up in his work. Millennium Actress borrows images from Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, from Yasujiro Ozu's films, from the chambara hero Kurama Tengu, and from the star Godzilla. George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five, from 1972, influenced it directly. In college, the body of work that mattered most was Terry Gilliam's, including Time Bandits in 1981, Brazil in 1985 and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1989. Of all filmmakers, though, he had read the most works and books by Akira Kurosawa.

  Among novelists, Ryotaro Shiba, the historical novelist, shaped Kon's sense of his own relationship with Japan. Haruki Murakami inspired him. He had seen Blade Runner in 1982 before reading the novel, and Philip K. Dick drew him toward images of nightmares. Yasutaka Tsutsui mattered most. Kon read Tsutsui intensively around the age of 20, and the influence ran so deep that he could not say where it showed. For Kon, Tsutsui's appeal was "deviation from common sense," and the lesson was to "doubt the framework of common sense."

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• 6. Final Months

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  In May 2010 Kon was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and given half a year to live. He chose to spend the rest of his life at home. He told only a few people, and in his final message he explained why. Part of the reason was embarrassment at how thin and ravaged his body had become. The illness advanced quickly. Kon died on the 24th of August 2010, at the age of 46.

  Shortly before the end, Kon wrote that final message. His family uploaded it to his blog after he died.

  Time included Kon among its Fond Farewells in its roundup of notable people of 2010. Darren Aronofsky wrote a eulogy, which was printed in a Japanese retrospective book on Kon's animation career.

  At Kon's funeral, mourners heard Susumu Hirasawa's "Rotation (LOTUS-2)," the theme song of Millennium Actress.

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• 7. Dreaming Machine

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  After Ohayō, Kon started work on his next film, Dreaming Machine, known in Japanese as Yumemiru Kikai. According to Takeshi Honda, an animator and frequent collaborator, Kon vanished in the middle of production. Most of the staff, including producer Masao Maruyama, had not been told about the cancer. Maruyama recorded the film's script at Kon's deathbed and promised to see the project through.

  In November 2010 Madhouse officially announced that it would continue the film. Animation director Yoshimi Itazu would act as director. In 2011 the project stopped for financial reasons.

  At Otakon 2012, Maruyama, who had been involved in every Kon film from Perfect Blue to Paprika, spoke about the shortfall. He said, "Unfortunately, we still don't have enough money." His personal goal was to raise it within five years of Kon's death. By 2013 completion remained uncertain because of funding trouble, with only 600 of the 1,500 shots animated.

  In July 2015 Maruyama reported that the film was still in production. The team was looking for a director who could match Kon's abilities and similar vision.

  By August 2016, speaking as a producer at Mappa, Maruyama described years of searching for a suitable director. Before Kon's death, the storyboard and script were done, along with part of the keyframe work. Maruyama reasoned that even if someone could imitate Kon, it would still read as imitation. He gave Mamoru Hosoda as an example. A finished film under Hosoda would be good, but it would be Hosoda's movie. In Maruyama's words, "Dreaming Machine should be Kon's movie, him and only him, not someone else's." He concluded that the better course was to take only Kon's original concept and let someone turn it into a feature film. He also considered making a documentary about Kon.

  Maruyama has not fully given up on the film. He said, "If a talented director from overseas is willing to take on the project, it is not entirely without possibility."

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• 8. Legacy

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  Artists and works have drawn on Kon's realistic visual expression and vivid editing, and his influence has continued since his death. It has been more pronounced among foreign filmmakers than in Japan, where directors such as Darren Aronofsky and Guillermo del Toro have voiced their support.

  Aronofsky is one of the directors most influenced by Kon, especially by Perfect Blue. In a 2001 interview, he said that any scene in Requiem for a Dream that appears influenced by Perfect Blue is a homage to it.

  Several critics pointed to similarities between Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan and Perfect Blue. Aronofsky denied any direct influence.

  Christopher Nolan's 2010 film Inception also drew comparisons from critics and scholars to Kon's Paprika from 2006. They noted similarities in plot, in scenes and in characters.

  Aronofsky has said that he still wants to make a live-action version of Perfect Blue.

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