Paranoia Agent 8 (Warning: Some light spoilers for the episode and show ahead. I apologize, but having half of the post in black bars is kind of uncomfortable.)
It's nice coming back to the classics from time to time, when the taste of their greatness is leaving the mind and it feels like it's time to re-experience some of the best things anime can offer yet again.
Episode 8 - "Happy Family Planning" is without doubt the high point of
Paranoia Agent, and a great display of
Satoru Utsunomiya's mastery of the craft, among the myriad of amazing animators who worked on the episode (
Hiroyuki Okiura,
Norio Matsumoto,
Takeshi Honda,
Toshiyuki Inoue,
Tetsuya Nishio, among some others).
It's a self-contained story, and as such it's not really necessary to be familiar with the series' main story or characters, although there are some minor cameos (particularly the identities of "FOX" and "Horse").
As soon as the opening ended, I was greeted with this shot, already forecasting the oddly appealing quality of the framing (and the animation too). An old man walking through the streets of Tokyo. At face value, it doesn't seem like much, but we are in Paranoia Agent's Japan, so we know something unsettling is bound to happen.
And boy does the episode deliver. It is particularly light in tone, more so than the other parts of the show, and most of the happenings in the episode are comedic in nature. But what makes it so delightfully disturbing is the subject matter: the
three main characters -Zebra, Fuyubachi and Kamome- have wacky hijinks as they try and fail to kill themselves.
One would expect such a topic to be handled with utmost seriousness, more so in a show like this where almost everything is serious and gritty, but (cleverly, in my opinion) the value of life is portrayed as something to laugh at. We accompany these characters as they repeatedly show their incompetence at ending their lives, and this is depicted in a very comedic, almost slapstick-ish way, set to a "funny" lighthearted BGM.
There is some delicious black comedy going on in this episode that arises from the
dissonance between the execution and the actual events we're being presented with. Kamome even throws cute little tantrums about wanting to suicide with the other two protagonists, like it was something as mundane as buying an ice cream in the shop across the street.
The script doesn't miss its chance to make subtle commentary about some issues of contemporary Japanese life (or at least, of Paranoia Agent's vision of Japan), while simultaneously integrating some backstory for the characters and how they came to be in this situation seamlessly into a quirky, jumpy and very enjoyable pace.
The most incredible aspect of this episode for me was the twist. It's one of those "a-ha!" moments that makes you go back and check to see if they're pulling it out of their ass, only to be overwhelmed with fascination when it turns out it had been in your face all the time.
In fact, there are some not-really-that-subtle shots emphasizing the shadows and how our main trio is devoid of them:
Very attentive viewers will see this right away, but most people probably didn't even care, and even those who noticed it while watching probably attached it to production fuck ups or something along those lines. But then, as the narrative seems like it'll go into yet another gag about becoming an hero,
that scene happens and
BAM!, they hit you right in the face with it. Everything that follows is simply perfect, from the animation of the old man's reaction, to the funnily awesome photograph scene that ends the episode on the same note it began: whimsy, disturbing and fascinating.
This is some grade-S, good-good-good stuff. EVERYTHING fits together perfectly. The framing, editing and idiosyncratic animation style (Utsunomiya was the AD, after all) are in service of a tightly crafted script to create a truly memorable piece of animation.
Incidentally, this whole episode feels like a feature film crammed into 20 minutes of runtime. And the best thing is that it works perfectly with that amount of time. It never drags, it never feels like it should be longer, it has a very high density of content while never losing its groove.
R.I.P. Satoshi Kon, you were truly the genius behind the geniuses that crafted this little film. It's no coincidence that this sort of display happens in a show of his, who was a man of a great vision.
As a footnote, I challenge animeGAF to present a self-contained anime episode that can top this one. To make it narrower, something that came out after its airing (~2004).
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