Both Christopher Nolan's Inception and Satoshi Kon's Paprika are about dreams. The former deals with agents who enter people's dreams to extract information or plant ideas, while the latter deals with a therapist treating people by entering their dreams. Inception is about the way ideas fight to lodge themselves in our subconscious, with dreams forming the front lines of those battles. Paprika, on the other hand, is more concerned with the psychology of dreams, and the way they form a feedback loop with our daily lives. Though these dream movies sound very different, they're actually quite alike. But, of the two Paprika's compassionate, surrealist approach to the world of dreams gives it a leg up on the competition.

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Inception Ripped Off Paprika

Inception is first and foremost an action movie, albeit one with science-fiction leanings. The high-speed chases, gunfights and explosions are realistic, at least in a Hollywood way. None of these things violate the laws of physics the way they might in a dream. The characters travel between locales as they shift from one level of a dream to the next, but these are more or less believable backdrops for the action. And, in terms of the technology, there's barely a description of the way the dream machines work, except for Arthur mentioning that they're military designed.

Paprika, in comparison, is an animated psychological thriller that relishes in its science-fiction subject matter. Psychotherapist Atusko Chiba uses the "DC Mini," a gadget that looks like a hairband, to enter dreams. Images from the DC Mini can be viewed on a computer and saved to its hard drive. Doctor Kosaku Tokita, the inventor, explains how it works in relative detail — the DC Mini isn't just a prop to move characters around, it's mechanics are vitally important to the story.

Paprika also deals in functional surrealism, such as with a subplot focusing Detective Toshimi Konakawa's recurring nightmares about chasing a homicide suspect. In them, he ends up in a hall where he sees a shooting victim floating in the middle, while the perpetrator runs through a door on the other end. As he gives chase, he has difficulty running because the floor starts to undulate, and when he finally does exit, he immediately begins to fall.

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Inception's main preoccupation is the subconscious and the way ideas penetrate it. When dreaming, a person's conscious defenses are vulnerable, but even then the mind resists most ideas, as shown by the violent resistance Robert Fischer's mind puts up when it notices strange people, or projections, in his dream. Once an idea is embedded, though, it is almost impossible to remove. Cobb planted the idea in his wife's head that their world was not real because he wanted her to leave their constructed dream world. This backfires when they return to reality and Mal is utterly convinced her world is not real. Nolan uses the framework of dreams as a way to explore this concept, which is not so much about dreams but autonomy and free will.

Taking a more empathetic approach, Paprika addresses human aspirations and the way our "dreams" shape reality. Konakawa eventually finds out that the floating victim in his dream is actually himself, and that he is the perpetrator. When he was young, he had dreams of being a filmmaker, which he abandoned to become a detective. In other words, he killed that young version of himself. And the movie's namesake, Paprika, is the alter-ego that Chiba takes on when treating patients with the DC Mini. This persona is a freer and braver version of herself that she projects into the dream world, where she has superpowers, such as flight and transformation, which come in handy later on when the dream world begins to merge with reality.

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In Inception, time moves faster in dreams, allowing the characters to complete long tasks in a short period. However, the movie is very literal about space in the dream world. Architects, like Ariadne, create the places they will go in their dreams while making them convincing enough that the minds they infiltrate will not notice. Sometimes, they have to design dreams within dreams, called "levels," which results in an amount of detail that creates a virtual world of rigid construction and strict rules, a world not that different from the real one, with the exception of paradoxical architecture and malleable scenery. Some of the movie's most dream-like scenes occur when Cobb is training Ariadne and they cause boxes to fly and streets to bend vertically. Sadly, these kinds of effects are used rather sparingly.

On the other hand, in Paprika, when Doctor Chiba enters a patient's mind, she is entering an actual dream, not a dream that was constructed by an "architect." The dream world is therefore more surreal, but also more personal. For instance, in Konakawa's dream, several people with the same face charge him, he swings through the jungle like Tarzan and a briefcase turns into a guitar as Paprika smashes it over a man's head. In the latter half of the movie, things become even more psychedelic as the evil Doctor Seijiro Inui uses a stolen DC Mini to control the people's collective dreams and make them to march through the streets in a parade of toys. By merging reality with dreams, where he has supernatural powers, Inui hopes to take over the world. As Konakawa, Paprika and the others fight to stop him, more bizarre events unfold. Among them, Konakawa walks through a stretchy wall, Paprika enters a painting and turns into a Sphinx, and Chiba becomes a super-sized baby that vacuums up the evil dream world Inui has unleashed.

While each movie is focused on dreams, they use them in different ways. In Inception, dreams are a vehicle for the action and exploration into the subconscious. Though it has dream-like elements, it's more about the way ideas affect the human mind and less about dreams themselves. Paprika, in contrast, is about aspirations and is like a dream itself. It leaves a feeling of having just woken from a strange but inspiring vision.

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