Pretty Good

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

The series starts off with a mysterious attack by an unidentified baseball wielding perpetrator on a young graphic designer. With this the mystery begins, the perpetrator is labelled 'Li'll Slugger' by the media and then a series of other attacks happen across Tokyo. The next is a young middle school pupil, then a corrupt cop. We shift time scales and narratives even realms of consciousness to eventually a final showdown to the root cause of Li'll Slugger's reign. Many unexpected twists happen along the way, each episode is dedicated to a different character.This amazing series by the late great Satashi Kon has all the hall marks of his best work: satire, artistry, pathos and strong character development. The satire in this series is jet black and aimed squarely on Japan, in many ways this series can be read as an artistic poke at modern Japan's cult of weird. Everything is lampooned in this series from kawaii cartoon characters to ritual suicide. It seems that Kon has drawn up a list of many of the weirdest facets of Japanese culture (at least to the eyes of a western audience) and enthused them into this script under the guise of a crime thriller. With all the narrative changes and the strong emphasis on shifting characters, the actual final showdown is a bit of an anti-climax. However it is clear that this series is not intended to be viewed as a completed narrative piece. The series is more about segments with the main thread holding the series together being a focus on modern Japan's counter culture fetish, by the final episode most of what Kon has set out to lampoon has already been achieved, with the finale merely offering a sense of closure rather than revelation.In my opinion this is Japanese animation at is best, Satashi Kon was a genius, he understood that anime can be challenging, political and in some respects a greater medium than movies. It is fair to say that all of his works attempted to bridge this gulf between anime and art, and never is this more evident then in Paranoia Agent. Of all the great Japanese animators Kon was the most creative, cinematic and consistent. Despite the fact that Kon has only a hand full of full features to his name, his impact on modern cinema has been far reaching. Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan are two examples of Hollywood directors who hold Kon in high regard, both directly referencing the work of Kon in their own; Perfect Blue for Aronofsky and Paprika for Nolan. It is no coincidence that both men are two of the most creative and imaginative minds working in movies at the moment.Paranoia Agent is a fine example of Satashi Kon's genius and offered a glimpse at what Kon could have achieved if his life wasn't cruelly cut short. Paranoia Agent is a rare treat and one to be savoured.

I didn't watch much of the show when it was on Adult Swim, thinking it was too weird to have any coherent story to it. Having now watched the show from beginning to end about three times, I could not have been more wrong. This show is one of the most imaginative and also terrifying shows I've ever seen. It's great at atmosphere, it can be pretty funny when it wants to be, and the entire show is designed to erode your sense of reality. All this with a decent cast of unique characters and a story that is both whimsical and chilling, I definitely recommend this show to fans of horror everywhere. Everyone else, check it out, but don't blame me if it screws with your head too much

To me the series examines the psychological breaking point - the line pass which an individual becomes violent to others and/or self-destructive. Essentially, most of the victims of the "Bat Boy" are casualties of their own impaired judgement resulting from a tragedy or isolation. Each one is fighting a personified and externalized demon - a battle in which rare few succeed.The world portrayed in Paranoia Agent represents the warped reality of a temporarily deranged individual, unable to cope with stress and struggling to come to terms with reality.Throughout the series, the detective following mysterious bat boy cases is trying to figure out what he's most afraid of and whether he's strong enough to face his own fears.Paranoia Agent is the "happy place" people go to, and the pain that it brings when the veils are inevitably lifted.

Paranoia Agent, without doubt, is a good anime, but certainly not for everyone. It is a dark anime about a series of attacks carried out by a mysterious child known only as 'Lil Slugger', and the efforts of the detectives to find him/her. The show often takes different angles, away from the main characters, showing us what is happening with other characters on the show. There will be people, who after watching this, will be thinking 'WTF just happened?' after seeing some of the things this show contains. Towards the end the show becomes outrageously weird, Lil Slugger suddenly becoming more than 10 feet tall and Tsukiko's travels into an insanely weird environment, where everyone but him are 2-D characters. Throughout every episode, there is an old man, whose name was either never mentioned or I have forgotten it, but although he seems irrelevant, almost every episode ends up involving him in some main way, such as Episode 5: The Holy Warrior and later on, where he is referred to as The Old Master by a man called Mitsuhiro, who goes by the alias of Radar Man and fights with Lil Slugger from at least episode 11 (have not seen Disk 3) and is technically the one who solves the case of Lil Slugger. Without giving anything else away, I recommend this highly to anyone who likes a 'Smart' anime/show, and a good mystery at that. 8.5 out of 10