Cinematic Dreams: Wish Fulfillment and Visual Pleasure in Paprika

By Bridget Zhang, Edited by Alison Church

In KON Satoshi’s Paprika, chaos ensues when the world of dreams merges dangerously with the real world, causing reality to begin to fall apart. The 2006 Japanese animated film speculates about the future of psychiatric treatment, where a device called the “DC Mini” allows psychiatrists to access their patients’ dreams. The film opens with doctor CHIBA Atsuko using the device for a session with detective KONAKAWA Toshimi, assuming her alter-ego “Paprika” inside his dream. This use of dreams in therapy recalls Freudian psychoanalysis, brought to prominence by his seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams, which gave rise to a new understanding of the unconscious and the meaning found within dreams. Most importantly, he proposed that, “the dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish” (Freud 45). According to Freud, the manifest content of a dream is what we are able to perceive, while the latent content is the hidden meaning behind those images, of what was once recognized by the conscious mind but has now been pushed to the unconscious and suppressed. Paprika explores these ideas through its characters, showing how their dream selves are expressions of their repressed desires, serving as wish fulfillment. The overlapping qualities of dreams and the cinematic experience are expressed aptly through the medium of animation, with the entire film ultimately serving as a wish-fulfilling dream for the audience, and perhaps for Kon himself. 

The main recurring dream sequence in the film, the aforementioned opening scene, belongs to Konakawa, in which he chases and is chased by mysterious entities (Paprika, 00:27–03:24). This series of scenes initially appears to be linked to his detective work but is ultimately revealed to be an expression of the wish he once had to become a filmmaker. It begins with a mission to look for a suspect during a crowded circus show, in which he is magically teleported into a cage and targeted by members of the audience who disturbingly all bear his face. The idea of entrapment is evident here and the duplication of his own image would be the first sign of his captor being himself. He sinks through the cushioned ground as a visual representation of him going deeper into his mind, and moves through three dramatic scenes as if playing film roles: Tarzan swinging on a vine, a man getting strangled in a train cabin, and a photographer documenting a brawl. These each act as intertextual references to the films Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), From Russia with Love (1963), and Roman Holiday (1953), emphasizing the connection between his dream and cinema. Finally, he chases his suspect into a long physics-defying corridor and witnesses a murder, helplessly letting the perpetrator get away. He ends the dream screaming and just before regaining consciousness, a voice shouts, “What about the rest of it?” Freud delineates three classes of dreams and this would fall into the third, where the dream contains repression that is not or just barely concealed. A feeling of dread causes the dream to end, whereby “what is now present as intense dread in the dream was once desire, and is now secondary to the repression” (Freud 29). The reference to “the rest of it” could be about his failure to catch the suspect, or it could be evoking a sense of dismay at seeing a film with an incomplete ending—this entire dream as a film, as we will come to see. 

In the next iteration of this dream, instead of transitioning directly into Tarzan, Konakawa ends up in an elevator with Paprika where he watches the film-like scenes play out instead (Paprika, 39:00–42:00). As the doors open at each floor, Paprika points out the corresponding film genre of each scene: adventure, suspense, romance. Therefore, in her role as his therapist, Chiba/Paprika is helping him make sense of his dream sequence as having a close relation to films and filmmaking, compared to his earlier insistence that he did not like movies and that the dream’s content was influenced by his ongoing homicide case instead. They come closer to the repressed truth when they reach the “special section” marked as Floor 17. He assumes the role of the perpetrator and turns around to see that the victim has his face, leading to his bewildered conclusion of “I killed myself?” This statement begins to make sense later in the film when Konakawa recalls his memories of making a police movie with his friend when they were seventeen (Paprika, 59:50–01:02:35). Floor 17 is thus a displacement of the age when he first repressed the desire that has since been haunting him. The two friends shared a dream of becoming filmmakers, but Konakawa gave it up and left their movie unfinished. Given that Konakawa refers to his friend as “the other me” and that this entire revelation happened in the dream world, it is possible that he and his friend refer to two sides of himself. The part of him that decided to become a detective symbolically killed the part of him that wanted to go to film school. From then on, he repressed any desires related to film, including going to the movie theaters as a spectator. His youthful wish became “forgotten” and relegated to the realm of the unconscious, hidden in his dreams as a recurring nightmare. When he finally reconciles with this old desire and its associated regret, acknowledging those feelings and no longer pushing them away, he is once again able to walk into a movie theater in real life and enjoy the art form that he loved so much. 

In the other characters, we can also see how the dream space provides wish fulfillment for repressed desires. Chiba in the real world is rigid and solemn, while Paprika in the dream world is cheeky and playful—they could not be more different while being the same person. Perhaps like the detective who gave up an artistic career and pursued a more practical path, Chiba’s way of giving in to societal expectations was to repress her lively nature, to fit the image of a female scientist who wanted to be taken seriously. Only in the dream space can she express her other side, and thus it is only when dream and reality collide that she finally reconciles the two. In a short but pivotal exchange between Chiba and Paprika, the two disagree on who should be taking the lead. While it may seem that Chiba is the primary personality who inhabits the conscious mind, and Paprika is her secondary personality in the unconscious, Paprika herself remarks, “Have you ever thought that maybe you are a part of me?” calling this hierarchical relationship into question (Paprika, 01:15:00). It is at this juncture that Chiba begins confronting the repressed part of herself, which has also suppressed her romantic interest in TOKITA Kōsaku, the inventor of the DC Mini. He is regarded as a genius but child-like, with the film also emphasizing his size in the introductory scene where he is seen physically stuck in an elevator and has to be pulled out by Chiba. Tokita can be compared with OSANAI Morio, another colleague of theirs who is ultimately revealed to be one of the villains, but whose appearance ironically conforms to the filmic stereotype of a handsome male love interest, unlike Tokita. Osanai shows obsessive interest in Chiba and his villainous side is emphasized in a scene where he lays Paprika on a table like a specimen and violates her by reaching in and pulling her apart to reveal the body of Chiba encased within. In an interview with Kon by Mark Slutsky, he explains, “this reflects [Osanai’s] selfishness of not accepting her entire personality but only picking out what he finds favourable [sic]. That’s why he doesn’t desire the Paprika-Atsuko personality as a whole, but lusts the Atsuko part, resulting in him extracting Atsuko from Paprika’s body” (Kon). Compare this to Tokita when he is stuck in his robotic dream-form, who swallows Chiba and finds the taste in need of a little spice, a little Paprika. His words serve as a metaphor for how he recognizes both sides of Chiba and how “he accepts Paprika and Atsuko as a whole,” unlike Osanai (Kon). While Osanai may seem like the more socially-acceptable romantic interest, appearance-wise, the film shows how it is Chiba and Tokita’s acceptance of each other deep down that makes them suitable partners. The film therefore ends with an announcement that hints at their marriage and at Chiba’s acceptance of both sides of herself in the real world.

The desire for another self is also embodied by the chairman of the Institute for Psychiatric Research, INUI Seijirō. While he uses a wheelchair in the real world, his dream self has grown tentacle-like tree roots to replace his legs, using them to move about freely and maliciously, chasing Paprika through his dream (Paprika, 53:45–54:45). Unlike Konakawa and Chiba who embody the liberating effects of reconciling with one’s repressed desires, Inui exemplifies the dangers of conflating dream and reality. For Inui, it is in the dream world that he has the power to obtain what he cannot have in the real world—as he says, “there are no boundaries in dreams” (Paprika, 55:25). With the DC Mini, reality has entered the realm of dreams and is able to influence it, with the opposite being true too. Inui thus steals the device to initiate the overspill of dreams into the real world, where his power will become boundless and allow him to control both the physical and metaphysical worlds. The irony lies in how he claims to be “the guardian of dreams [whose] duty is to mete out justice to terrorists like [Paprika]” (Paprika, 53:45), when he is the one taking away people’s autonomy, and Paprika is instead helping them. Wish fulfillment for him lies in his delusion of doing good for the world, when he is the real terrorist, a fact which he has evidently repressed. 

To a certain extent, there is a parallel drawn between Chiba and Inui. Under different circumstances, Chiba/Paprika could very well have become the “terrorist” that he claimed her to be, for she had easy access to the DC Mini and could have misused it if she had intentions beyond conducting treatments with private patients like Konakawa. During the dream-reality spillage when Chiba demands that Paprika follow her decisions, Paprika remarks, “To think that you can control yourself and others. You’re just like an old baldy I know” (Paprika, 01:15:10). While the emphasis is how Chiba has partitioned away a part of herself and tried to exert control over it, there is again a parallel between Chiba and Inui, the only difference being the scope at which this control operates: Chiba over the two sides of her self, Inui over the entire world. It is therefore fitting that ultimately, Chiba-Paprika, having let go of the need to control her desires, becomes the one to defeat the giant malignant form of the chairman. 

Liberation for Chiba is envisioned through rebirth, whereby a gigantic version of herself rapidly goes through the growth phases from baby to adult, rivaling the form of Inui and swallowing—therefore killing—him. It may be tempting to assign a Freudian reading to this turn of events too, particularly in relation to his interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, but it seems that Kon’s intention is instead to subvert the Freudian theory. To be sure, there is a return to childhood as a method for overcoming repression to reach the hidden truth, and the slaying of a male “father” figure as per the original tragedy of fate. The film indeed contains many visual references to the tale, with paintings of the Sphinx and Oedipus seen in an office at the institute and at the chairman’s home (Paprika, 31:45 and 54:37). The proliferation of this imagery points to its significance, with six paintings and two statues in one room at the chairman’s home, as if the tale is an obsession for him. If any, it is an ironic obsession, for Oedipus may have obtained kingly power through solving the Sphinx’s riddle, but it only contributed to his fulfillment of the prophecy where he marries his mother after killing his father, pushing him towards a tragic fate that he could not control. In this sense then, Inui is positioned not as the father figure but as Oedipus. He thinks he has “defeated the Sphinx,” or unfolded the mystery of cosmic power with the DC Mini as his key to access it. Yet for all of his obsession with power and control, he is consumed by a greed that spirals out of control, terminated only by Chiba-Paprika’s literal consumption of him and his dream spillage. The additional departure from a Freudian line of analysis would be with Paprika as female “heroine” instead of “hero,” standing in contrast to the male-centered Oedipus tale and the derived Freudian complex. In spite of a few similarities, there are no grounds for an Oedipal reading of the climactic scenario – after all, Paprika is not the one trapped by a prophetic fate and instead frees the world from the tragedy imposed by Inui. It is clear that despite invoking dreams and the Oedipus tale (both of which hold important links to Freud’s theories), Kon’s film somewhat mocks the Freudian reading by positing its own alternative relationship to the Oedipus tale. 

In a broader sense, beyond looking at the characters, the entire film could also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling dream. Returning to our initial analysis of Konakawa, the film self-reflexively shows his dream as a video that can be played and stopped, emphasizing its filmic quality with transitions like the match cut (when Paprika swings down a briefcase that turns into a guitar) and freeze frame (when the guitar-slamming scene pauses just before Konakawa spots his suspect in the crowd). Dream is thus film-like and film is dream-like, a montage of fractured images, an escape to a world away from reality. This identification of the oneiric qualities of film and vice versa has had a long history in critical theory, beginning with a dispute that arose upon the invention of cinema concerning its paradoxical qualities of simultaneously reproducing reality and creating imaginary scenes recalling “magic and dream” (Rascaroli 1). Laura Rascaroli goes on to identify various theorizations on the filmlike nature of dream and the dreamlike nature of cinema, and of particular interest is her Freudian reading of Ronald Fairbairn’s comparison of film actors and dream characters. In a dream, the dreamer does not simply spectate but is said to narcissistically take on every role to also become the director and main character of their dream scenario, whereby the sensation of being a helpless spectator is simply a defense mechanism to escape responsibility for the dream content (Rascaroli 3). This again relates to Konakawa’s dream where he plays a multitude of roles, with his face duplicated as both victim and perpetrator, corroborating the earlier conclusion that his own repressed desires were responsible for his dream content. Expanding on this film-dream relationship for the movie spectator, the very experience of watching a film recalls the act of dreaming, both presented as bright projections in a dark space. While the hypocritical dreamer takes on the role of mere dream spectator as a defense mechanism, the actual spectator in the movie theater also assumes a level of hypocrisy in their seemingly innocent and passive watching of the film (Rascaroli 3). Rascaroli elaborates by saying that the film spectator is subconsciously identifying with the characters and fulfilling their unexpressed desires through them. This argument recalls Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory, which posits a narcissistic gaze where pleasure in looking comes from identification with the role of the actor on screen, as well as a scopophilic gaze where one treats the actor as an object of pleasure (16–18). Mulvey’s theory further emphasizes the un-passive role of the spectator, where the darkness of the movie theater additionally creates a layer of voyeuristic separation to fulfill the repressed fantasy they project onto the actor, in many instances seen in the objectification of Paprika by the characters who dream of her, and thus relationally by us, the spectators. Therein is how, as a film, Paprika inevitably serves as a wish-fulfilling dream. What is significant here is how the medium of animation emphasizes this dreamlike quality further. Even when the villain is defeated and everyone returns to the “real world,” it is still not reality as we, the spectators, know it. The malleability of animation adds to the power of film to create narratives and fulfill fantasies, having no boundaries as to what one can depict, just like in a dream. It is this quality that allows for the especially blurred boundaries between dream and reality in Paprika, because we move from one un-reality to another un-reality, stuck in an almost never-ending realm of wish fulfillment. 

Paprika has this unique, immediately identifiable relationship to oneiric qualities of film precisely because of its meta-engagement with psychoanalytic theory, as discussed above, and film history. We find many examples in Konakawa’s dream sequence, from the initial circus setting that recalls The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) at 0:50, to his rapid-switching roles in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) at 2:17, From Russia with Love (1963) at 2:24, and Roman Holiday (1953) at 2:33. These intertextual references, among many others depicted throughout the dream world, shows Kon’s attempt to place his film in dialogue with classic Hollywood films. On one hand, these are significant films for Konakawa, the character who had repressed his love for films, but we might equally say that Kon’s inclusion of these specific films suggests that he holds them in high regard too as a lover and creator of cinema. Since the existence of Paprika is itself a testament to the success that Kon has achieved in his career, we should consider the significance of the backstory that he has created for Konakawa, who failed to become a filmmaker and thereafter dreamed repeatedly of his traumatic separation with his once greatest desire. Perhaps this character is the imagined version of who Kon himself might have become had he given up on animation and filmmaking. However, there is another possibility linked to our discussion on film as a wish-fulfilling dream. After all, true wish fulfillment for Konakawa would have been if he once again picked up his camera to make a film. Instead, as partial fulfillment, he becomes a film spectator in a movie theater lined with the posters of Kon’s own films. Therefore, continuing with the meta-engagement, Kon’s making of Paprika can itself serve as wish fulfillment for the in-film unfulfilled act of making a film—perhaps Konakawa is walking into a screening of Paprika and the cinematic experience begins for him when it ends for us. 

Paprika is an imagining of a future where a physical device provides people with access to the world of dreams, forming a parallel to how Freud’s theories provided access to a new way of thinking about dreams. The film demonstrates Freud’s idea of dreams as wish fulfillment through the dream manifestations of the characters, offering a message where reconciliation with one’s repressed desires can lead to a liberating satisfaction with who they truly are and who they have become in the journey of life, as is the case of Chiba and Konakawa. At the same time, it cautions against confusing dream and reality, which could only lead to a disastrous destruction of both worlds and eventually of the self, distancing itself from a fully Freudian reading. The film’s oneiric qualities indeed emphasize how wish fulfillment does not end with the characters, but that the entire film serves as a wish-fulfilling dream. Therefore, Paprika may feel like a fantastical 1-hour-30-minute-long dream, but when the credits roll, so too must we remember to return to reality. 

Works Cited 

Freud, Sigmund. Dream Psychology : Psychoanalysis for Beginners. Translated by M.D. Eder, The James A. McCann Company, 1920. 

Kon, Satoshi. Something Good #28: Satoshi Kon - the Lost Interview. Interview by Mark Slutsky, 2007, markslutsky.substack.com/p/something-good-28-satoshi-kon. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023. 

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6. 

Paprika. Directed by Satoshi Kon, Sony Pictures Classics, 2007. 

Rascaroli, Laura. “Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory.” Kinema, Nov. 2002, openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/view/982/1053. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.