Reception
Paprika has received positive reviews from most film critics. It holds an 83% "Fresh" approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 86 reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10 and the consensus, "Following its own brand of logic, Paprika is an eye-opening mind trip that rarely makes sense but never fails to dazzle. The film weaves in and out of dream worlds seamlessly and presents an offbeat puzzle of a fantasy." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score, rated the film 81 out of 100, based on 26 reviews from film critics. Paprika won the Best Feature Length Theatrical Anime Award at the sixth-annual Tokyo Anime Awards during the 2007 Tokyo International Anime Fair.
Andrez Bergen of Yomiuri Shimbun praised the film as the "most mesmerizing animation long-player since Miyazaki's Spirited Away five years ago (in 2001)." He also praised the film's animation and backgrounds. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film a positive review, saying that the film is a "sophisticated work of the imagination" and called the film "challenging and disturbing and uncanny in the ways it captures the nature of dreams". LaSalle later went on to say that the film is a "unique and superior achievement." Rob Nelson of The Village Voice praised the film for its visuals. However, he complained about the plot of the film, saying that Paprika is not "a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced - or maybe dreamed." Nelson later went on to say that Kon "maintains a charming faith in cinema's ability to seduce fearless new (theater) audiences, even one viewer at a time." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times said that the film has a "sense of unease about the rapidly changing relationship between our physical selves and our machines." Dargis also praised Kon for his direction, saying that he "shows us the dark side of the imaginative world in Paprika that he himself has perceptively brightened."
Conversely, Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel gave the film a negative review, saying "With a conventional invade-dreams/bend-reality plot, it's a bit of a bore. It's not as dreamlike and mesmerizing as Richard Linklater's rotoscope-animation Waking Life, less fanciful than the Oscar-winning anime Spirited Away." Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle said the film "is as trippy as a Jefferson Airplane light show" and criticized the characters and the dialogue in the film
According to a French magazine, Christopher Nolan has cited Paprika as an influence on his 2010 feature film, Inception. Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood praised the film in an interview, while Time Out Magazine included it in their top 50 animated film list. TIME Magazine included the film in its top 25 animated films of all time. Time Out also included the film in its list of top 50 animated films of all time. Rotten Tomatoes included it in its list of fifty best animated films of all time. Newsweek Japan included Paprika in its list of the 100 best films of all time, while the American edition of Newsweek included it among its top twenty films of 2007. Metacritic has listed the film among the top 25 highest-rated science fiction films of all time, and the top 30 highest-rated animations of all time.
Read more about this topic: Paprika (2006 Film)
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