Wonderful Blue is prepared in a time the place MiniDisc wasn’t an old-fashioned format, people still used fax machines, and the online wasn’t merely accessible to all people. Its cultural references might successfully shackle it to the earlier, nevertheless even 20 years on from its preliminary launch it has a chilling message that additionally strikes to the middle of our internet-connected society.
Following the story of Mima Kirigoe, a Japanese idol who leaves her singing career behind to pursue one in showing, Wonderful Blue appears to be on the affect of social media on the human psyche. In a time sooner than Twitter, Instagram, Fb and Snapchat made us present a filtered imaginative and prescient of ourselves to the world, Wonderful Blue delineated the long run dangers of social media’s lens by means of the early days of personalised web pages.
After her shift into the world of showing, Mima discovers that there’s a website supposedly being run as her non-public diary. Entitled Mima’s Room, the author is conscious of each half there could also be to search out out about her – along with which foot she stepped off the put together with inside the morning and the way in which she frets over her first line in a TV current.
These moments sound small and inconsequential nevertheless, as completely different components of Mima’s life begin to unravel around her, Mima’s Room turns right into a strategy for her to hint her life. This filtered and idealised imaginative and prescient of who Mima is seems further precise than the remaining happening around her. Mima’s disassociation with precise life comes from how rather a lot significance she places on the events inside Mima’s Room.
Wonderful Blue’s director, Satoshi Kon pulls no punches proper right here. The events that occur spherical Mima are violent and intensely uncomfortable, nevertheless their ferocity is important. It emphasises merely how little she cares for her private life when there’s someone available on the market dwelling a higher mannequin of it already.
On paper it sounds heavy-handed, nevertheless in execution, you’ll continuously be second-guessing your self about who’s behind Mima’s Room. Its story highlights the affect of the erosion of personal privateness. It was an unknown to many once more in 1997 nevertheless, inside the always-connected world of 2017, it attracts worrying parallels to the Instagram and Snapchat period’s way of life. In some methods, no matter having aged by 20 years, Wonderful Blue is further associated than ever as a result of method through which we now peek into completely different people’s lives.
Satoshi Kon’s forward-thinking work has had a far higher have an effect on in fashionable cinema than you may suppose. His scarily appropriate technological predictions have gone on to encourage and inform a couple of of Hollywood’s largest psychological movies. Battle Membership, Inception and Requiem for a Dream all owe one factor to Kon’s work.
In precise truth, Mother! director Darren Aronofsky now holds the rights to Wonderful Blue after he envisioned making a live-action remake. Sadly, that endeavor has not at all seen the sunshine of day, although Requiem makes plenty of nods to Kon’s work. You’ll be able to even see heavy influences of Wonderful Blue in Black Swan. It’s telling that this story of the blurred strains between internet and actuality, the conscious and unconscious self, has labored its strategy into the Western world by method of some of the twenty first century’s further daring filmmakers.
To commemorate the film’s twentieth anniversary, Anime Ltd is re-releasing Wonderful Blue in cinemas all through the nation for one evening time solely. Yow will uncover tickets for it over on the Cineworld, Vue and PictureHouse web pages.
Ought to you possibly can’t make it alongside to a exhibiting, worry not, you possibly can even uncover Wonderful Blue on Blu-ray and DVD.
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