The anime movie that inspired Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’
Throughout his career, Christopher Nolan has wowed audiences time and time again with his visually striking, genre-defining movies, but one of the most impressive is 2010’s science fiction action Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Wanatabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and several other high profile actors.
DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a professional thief who steals classified and valuable information from people’s subconscious by entering their dreams. Cobb has the opportunity to have his criminal record wiped by implanting specific information into one of his target’s minds. Inception is an incredibly difficult film to get one’s head around, but it’s one hell of a trip for sure.
Nolan’s movie, on the surface, seems like one of a kind, but like any director or artist, he can’t help but be influenced by the cinematic works that surround him. When it comes to Inception, there looks to be an intriguing link with one of the most celebrated anime directors of all time, Satoshi Kon.
Inception looks to have been particularly influenced by Kon’s 2006 psychological science fiction thriller Paprika, and there are a few glaring links between the two films. Kon’s final movie tells of a terrorist who steals a piece of technology that allows him to access people’s dreams and cause them to have nightmares.
A psychologist then enters the dream world to chase down the terrorist and investigate the case. The problem is that with the thief in the dream world, causing havoc, he distorts the boundaries between the sleeping and waking realities, leading to several dreamers getting physically hurt in their actual bodies.
The fact that both Nolan and Kon’s respective movies have a piece of technology that allows users to access the dreams of others is undeniable, but it also appears that Nolan was visually inspired by Kon, too. The animation of Paprika is second to none, and it has some of the most insane visual moments of the genre’s history.
One scene sees Detective Konakawa run down a hallway in pursuit of the thief, but as he advances, the hallway stretches until it wraps itself around him. Inception sees Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character tussle with a man in a reality-twisting hotel hallway that bears a striking resemblance to the aforementioned anime scene.
It was easier for Kon to toy with the physical side of reality because his film was animated, whereas Nolan had to rely on actual filming techniques. Nolan has never actually stated Kon’s influence, but as Joseph Gordon-Levitt notes in the film, “the subject can always trace the genesis of an idea.”
Nolan is not the only famed director to have been influenced by Kon, though, as Darren Aronofsky was also deeply inspired by his Japanese counterpart’s masterpiece Perfect Blue. Kon was known to have been annoyed by Aronofsky’s imitation, so we’ll never know how he felt about Inception as it arrived around the same time as his death in 2010.
