I just found out that anime director Kon Satoshi (or Satoshi Kon, as he's known in the West) died on Tuesday, at the age of forty-six. The cause of death was a pancreatic cancer that was already late-stage when discovered in May.
I'm not really a fan of anime. Most of the examples I've seen seem more concerned with attaching flashy visuals to cardboard characters and absurdly convoluted plots than with actually engaging the audience on an emotional and/or intellectual level. Kon was one of the few counterexamples I found. His filmography is brief—the dark Hitchcockian thriller Perfect Blue, the touching drama Millennium Actress, the powerful and funny Tokyo Godfathers, the surreal fantasy Paprika, and the television series Paranoia Agent—but easily establishes him as a significant and masterful filmmaker. Generally eschewing the fantastic and the bizarre for their own sakes (the exception to this being Paprika, his only misstep among his films; I haven't seen Paranoia Agent), his films focused on real-world situations—a celebrity stalked by an obsessed fan, an elderly actress reminiscing on her life, a homeless trio finding an abandoned baby in the trash—and how they impacted relatively ordinary, realistic characters. Fantastic elements—for instance, the documentarians comically finding themselves included in Chiyoko's memories in Millennium Actress—were usually only included to support the story, not the other way around.
Kon's focus on story, character, and genuine emotion and drama set him apart from the vast majority of anime filmmakers. His animes weren't the only ones more interested in telling affecting stories than with showing off the most bizarre robot or mutant designs, but in my (admittedly rather limited) experience they're few and far between (Grave of the Fireflies, the films of Miyazaki Hayao). I own only one anime DVD that isn't a Miyazaki film or The Animatrix, and it's Tokyo Godfathers. Not Ninja Scroll, not Ghost in the Shell, not even Akira. As pieces of storytelling, Kon's films stand head and shoulders over the vast majority of the competition in the world of anime. It's a true shame that such a creatively fruitful career should end so soon. Kon's death is a loss to anime and to cinema as a whole.
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Before his death, Kon wrote a farewell message, which can be found in translation here.
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