Perfect Blue (1998) Reviews: What Critics Said

Editorial note: This is a roundup of published criticism of Perfect Blue. Celluloid has not screened the film for this piece, and it carries no Celluloid rating. The critics are named and linked under Sources.

Is Perfect Blue worth watching?

Most critics say yes: Satoshi Kon’s first feature was welcomed on its international release as a clever, unsettling psychological thriller, and later writers have found its view of fame and online obsession strikingly prescient. Reviewers admired the way it blurs performance, dream and reality, and its readiness to use animation for grown-up drama. The dissent is real, though: some found the plot hard to hold together, and The A.V. Club’s critic judged it too thin and too lurid to take seriously.

What is Perfect Blue about?

Mima Kirigoe, a rising pop idol, quits her singing group to pursue a career as an actress. After she takes a role in a popular television detective series, the people who handle and work with her begin turning up murdered. Haunted by guilt and by visions of her former self, Mima finds reality and fantasy merging into a frenzied paranoia. Satoshi Kon directed from a screenplay by Sadayuki Murai, based on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi. Junko Iwao voices Mima, with Rica Matsumoto as Rumi, Shiho Niiyama as Rei, Masaaki Okura as Mamoru Uchida and Shinpachi Tsuji as Tadokoro. The film was released in Japan in 1998 and runs 81 minutes. Release details and where to watch are on the Perfect Blue film page.

What critics praised

Writing in Sight and Sound in 1999, Jonathan Romney called it a feverish, culturally shrewd piece of work with a great deal to say about fame as an addiction shared by star and audience. He was struck by how Kon turns the flat, flimsy look and the repetitiveness of commercial animation into a way of expressing Mima’s unstable grip on what is real.

Kim Newman, in Empire, thought it about as far as anime could get from the noisy, repetitive titles then filling video shelves, telling a story that would stand up in live action while using effects only animation could achieve. He found it more striking as a portrait of a Japanese media star used up almost as soon as her teens are over than as a thriller, and credited it with exposing Japanese pop culture’s unhealthy fixation on childlike female performers. For Newman it was frightening, funny, touching and intelligent by turns, with set pieces worthy of Brian De Palma or Dario Argento.

In The Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov admitted to a strong sense of déjà vu, finding the film close to an animated version of Argento’s lesser-known gialli, but concluded that it succeeds as a sharp, disorienting portrait of a young woman on the edge of madness. He welcomed an anime that takes on adult subjects such as stalking and celebrity worship. Writing in Little White Lies in 2017, Daniel Schindel argued that the film was either ahead of its time or unusually alert to how the media and the internet shape the treatment of women, and that apart from its clunky computers it had hardly dated. He also valued Kon’s instinct to guide troubled characters towards a better place rather than simply break them.

Where critics were divided

The sharpest dissent came from Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club, writing in 2002. He granted the film its ambition, its striking design and some inspired flashes of animation, and thought its blurring of fantasy and reality as accomplished as that of The Matrix. But he found it caught between the artful and the prurient, with exploitative sexual content and needless bloodshed, an empty central character and flat dialogue made worse by a weak English dub. He considered it too shallow and lurid to be taken seriously.

Even admirers had reservations. Romney acknowledged that in narrative terms the film does not entirely make sense, particularly in how it handles the phantom version of Mima. Savlov suggested that viewers who know their Italian thrillers may feel they have seen much of it before.

Who is it for?

Perfect Blue is for adults. It is rated R in the US and 18 in the UK, and reviewers noted its violence and sexual content, including a rape scene filmed for the television drama within the story. It suits those drawn to psychological thrillers and to animation aimed squarely at grown-ups. Viewers who dislike ambiguity, or who find sexualised violence hard to watch, may side with Tobias.

The critical verdict

Critics have generally treated Perfect Blue as a clever, disturbing thriller about identity and celebrity that used animation for adult ends when few Western audiences expected it to. Newman, Savlov and Romney admired it around its international release, and Schindel later found it prophetic about online fame. Tobias’s view that it is shallow and exploitative remains the strongest objection, and even supporters conceded that its plot does not always hold together.