On the Passing of Satoshi Kon

DB here. Please give me a moment of your time before you go off to the next thing.

For those who aren't familiar with the work of Satoshi Kon are both an fortunate lot and an unfortunate lot. You are fortunate because when you do run across the work of Kon you will be in for some truly amazing treats. You are unfortunate because you can't understand what a HUGE loss the passing of Kon is.

Kon is, was, forgive me, I can't get my head around his death, Kon was one of the greatest filmmakers that I've ever run across, be it animation or live action. Kon knew how to tell a story and the best way to do that just happened to be animation.

Kon only turned out a handful of features and a TV series but all of them are magical gems that went from a Hitchcock style thriller(Perfect Blue), to drama(Millennium Actress) to whimsy (Tokyo Godfathers) to a science fiction film with a romance at its center (Paprika). Some where in there he did a TV series called Paranoia Agent, which broke the rules about what a TV series should be. The films are some of the best films of each of the years they came out and even the one I wasn't sure about (Tokyo Godfathers) has turned out to be a magical film on second and fourth viewings.

When Eden told me about Kon's passing I was heartbroken. I was and I still am really beyond words. What I just said about Kon was easy to write because it's straight reporting. Rarely does the passing of someone I don't know, except through his work reduce me to tears, but Kon's passing did. I still can't really explain what he meant to me and to film. Desperate to have his passing marked I asked Eden to please write something, anything, because he was some one who mattered (As Wednesday evening, The New York Times, the so called paper of recorded still hadn't noticed).

Eden did better than I could hope to do and found the words to really say something, especially since I know his death touched her as well.

However one review isn't enough. As Randi said, you have to do what Turner Classic Movies does and pre-empt your programming for a proper retrospect. And that's what we're going to do. At the start of October we scheduled a week and a bit of films to tie in to the New York Comicon being in New York. I'm scraping the final three days of the series and I'm going to see about getting three good pieces written and cover Perfect Blue, Paprika, and Three Godfathers.I know it's a little bit off but I don't want to just have anything put up. I mean he gave us his best so we should do likewise.

While we get our pieces together, do yourself a favor and go rent Kon's films and find the wonder that those of us here at Unseen Films have found in his work.