Name: Perfect Blue - “How do you know that the person you were one second ago, is the same person that you are right now?”
Item: Perfect Blue
Rating: 80
Author: @dedicatedguy

This was an excellent psychological thriller! Perfect Blue is an animated movie from the 90s about the life of a pop idol who in order to continue progressing with her career, decides to leave her pop group and become an actress. One of the reasons I decided to watch this movie is because it was compared with the more recent Hollywood production "Black Swan". I saw the same type of comparison between "Inception" and the animated movie "Paprika" so I will also watch this movie very soon.

In Perfect Blue, there are 3 main characters. The singer turned actress, her female manager, and a weird-looking obsessed fan that seems like a disturbed guy. The issues begin when the main character takes the difficult decision to change from a successful singer to an actress. She leaves her 2 teammates and fellow singers and embarks on an adventure on her own in the acting industry. It becomes clear that some people aren't happy with this decision. She receives ugly messages and discovers a strange diary-like website about her life, the only problem is that she didn't write that.

She is under a lot of stress because she must do a good job with her scripts so her career can progress nicely, in the meantime, her 2 ex-teammates are doing better than ever with their new song. She starts to wonder if she took the right decision but all she can do now is give her best in her new job.

Being a new actress, she needs to prove herself and agrees to take on a controversial role. This is actually very normal in real life, a lot of famous actors and actresses did embarrassing roles and scenes at the beginning of their career. In this case, the compounded effect of having accumulated stress, her constant doubt about leaving the music industry, and the emotional demanding scene she agreed to film, all of this together ends up taking a toll in her psyche.

The plot is only for adults, it has a particular scene that is clearly +18 even though it is an animated film. It is also very dark because it explores the topic of psychological deterioration and another related topic that I will not mention because it could be a spoiler. The animation is very acceptable, especially taking into account this movie is from the 90s.

I would recommend this movie for people that enjoy psychological thrillers and a bit of a dark touch. The story is certainly worth watching and despite the fact animation is not commonly used for dark stories, this shouldn't prevent people from giving this flick a shot.