Ask John: Was Inception Inspired By Anime?

Question:
Why do people keep calling Inception “original” when it’s clearly “inspired” by Paprika and, even if it wasn’t, has been done before in the cyberpunk genre, much like The Matrix before it? Are they that oblivious to the latter anime’s existence like they appeared to be with Ghost in the Shell? Or are they just too lazy to look for new stuff so they’re ready to slap that label on any flashy film they see?

Answer:
Honestly speaking, this question strays a bit outside of the realm of anime related discussion, so I’m hesitant to address it. But I do think it’s an interesting question, and it can be discussed in relation to anime. So I’ll do so. I’ve long thought that originality is over rated, and in relation to creative art, this question drives at the heart of critical evaluation. In a broad sense, creator/director Christopher Nolan’s live action film Inception is “original” in the sense that it’s not an adapted work. It’s not a remake; it’s not an adaptation of a previously existing novel, game, comic, television series, play, or movie. The fact that the characters and world of Inception were created by Nolan specifically for the motion picture constitute an original concept. Should this film get the Oscar nomination it deserves, it will be nominated in the “Best Original Screenplay” category rather than the “Best Adapted Screenplay” category.

In a broader sense, practically every movie exhibits some degree of reference to previous films. Allow me to quote actor & director Sylvester Stallone: “Everything’s been done and it’s a matter of how you reinterpret styles and concepts to make them fresh, original, unexpected.” Nolan has already stated that much of Inception was inspired by James Bond. “The Bond influence on the film was very intentional because, for me, growing up with the Bond films – they’ve always stood for grand-scale action (and) stood for the promise of being taken to some place bigger than you could have imagined.” Numerous earlier American films including Altered States (1980), Dreamscape (1984), Total Recall (1990), and Waking Life (2001) revolve around lucid dreaming. Any or all of these films may have been a conscious or second-hand influence on Nolan’s Inception. Paprika has been paralleled to Inception because both films are smart, adult thrillers that involve professional specialists immersing themselves in other people’s dreams. However, the parallels seem to end there. Director Satoshi Kon’s Paprika film involves a psychologist entering dreams to locate and dismantle psychological anchors. She discovers that someone is manipulating dreams for the purpose of eliminating individuality. While Inception does include the resolution of a psychological conflict, it’s primarily about a dream specialist doing the opposite of Paprika, creating a psychological anchor in the subject’s mind. Paprika involves no corporate espionage, no conflicted personal history for the protagonist, no gunplay, no dream diving team of specialists, and no simultaneous multiple levels of dream strata. Paprika may have some superficial similarity, and a similar suspenseful, intelligent tone, with Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but I don’t see reason to guess that Nolan consciously patterned his story on either Satoshi Kon’s 2006 film or Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 novel that the film is based on.

In fact, I see more parallels between Inception and Casablanca (1942) than I do between Inception and Paprika. Inception and Casablanca both star experienced, weathered men haunted by a former love. Casablanca’s driven and formal Victor Laszlo parallels Inception’s driven and formal Arthur, with a little bit of Laszlo’s affection for the female lead surfacing in Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Eames. Casablanca’s Ilsa Lund is a married woman who commits intrigue and leaves the man she loves, just like Inception’s Mal. Inception’s Ariadne is the young woman given an opportunity by the older protagonist, just as happens to Casablanca’s Annina Brandel. The witty Captain Renault of Casablanca parallels Inception’s exotic wit Eames. Major Strasser is the foreign authority figure in Casablanca. Saito is the foreign authority figure in Inception. Both characters experience the same injury. Casablanca and Inception are both suspenseful and romantic films revolving around a complex scheme, and both films result in their main characters all experiencing degrees of redemption.

Anime does have a number of titles that revolve around immersion in dreams, some of them predating Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 Paprika novel. “Beautiful Dreamer,” the second Urusei Yatsura movie from 1984 took place in multiple layers of lucid dream. The 1987 OVA “Inaba the Dream Maker” again depicted the Urusei Yatsura cast descending into the dream world. Like a forerunner to Paprika, the 1985 Dream Hunter Rem OVA series stars Rem Ayanokoji, a detective hired to enter people’s dreams and eliminate the causes of nightmares. That same concept, minus the bloody violence, reappeared in the 2006 Yume Tsukai anime television series. 2007’s Yumedamaya Kidan anime involves a character traversing through multiple depths of dream reality to recover a child, which sounds similar to Inception, yet there’s no obvious similarity in the execution of the two works.

I don’t believe that it’s irresponsible or shortsighted to call Inception “original” without acknowledging earlier anime and movies that tread similar territory. I concede that there are superficial similarities between Inception and anime like Paprika, Yume Tsukai, and Dream Hunter Rem, but the parallels and similarities aren’t significant enough to convince me that Inception was consciously or literally inspired by or patterned on any particular anime. There’s no contemporary movie that can be said to exhibit absolutely no similarity to prior films. Demanding that “original” constitute absolutely never before seen concepts and situations is an impossibly elevated standard. When Hollywood’s output is dominated by sequels (Iron Man 2, Toy Story 3, Twilight 3, Predators), adaptations (The A-Team, Last Airbender, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), remakes (The Karate Kid, Clash of the Titans, Nightmare on Elm Street), and recycled stories (the nearly overlapping theatrical distribution of Killers and Knight & Day), a film like Inception that doesn’t fall into any of those categories earns its “original” accreditation.