Wednesday 18th of May 2005

WHEN DARKNESS OVERCOMES THE HEART, LIL' SLUGGER APPEARS…

From the genius mind of Satoshi Kon, the visionary and award-winning director responsible for the anime features Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers and Millennium Actress, comes PARANOIA AGENT, a 13-episode series coming soon to DVD courtesy of MVM.

Thanks in no small part to superb animation production by Madhouse (Animatrix; Metropolis) and imaginative character design by Masashi Ando (Spirited Away; Princess Mononoke), in PARANOIA AGENT Kon has brilliantly translated the stunning cinematic style and quality of his earlier features to this truly innovative anime series. In fact, the show's intricately plotted storyline and strong characterisations bear more relation to the works of David Lynch than to the usual anime fare involving giddy schoolgirls, giant robots and futuristic starships. The sheer originality of PARANOIA AGENT has led DVD World to call it "Dark, disturbing and utterly fantastic", while Total DVD has quite rightly hailed it as "The most essential Anime release of the year."

PARANOIA AGENT is a dark, sometimes unsettling and constantly intriguing story of two police detectives attempting to unravel the labyrinthine mystery of a phantom criminal dubbed Lil' Slugger.

When a young, successful toy designer suffering from creative stress claims she has been attacked by a baseball bat-wielding youth on rollerblades, her colleagues and the police suspect it may just be a desperate plea for attention on her part. However, subsequent attacks on several more unrelated victims prove otherwise and soon Tokyo is gripped by a form of collective hysteria. As the mystery deepens, the police are forced to ask themselves if the so-called Lil' Slugger is real or just an imagined figment brought on by the victims' paranoia.

To reveal any more plot details of Kon's fascinatingly constructed and extremely compelling PARANOIA AGENT would simply spoil the experience of watching it develop. Needless to say, this unmissable series from the one of most interesting directors currently working in Japan also promises to be one of the most talked about anime releases of the year and has been hailed by Sight and Sound as "A shocking, witty and supremely assured psycho-thriller".

It's time to get paranoid.