SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / World of anime director Satoshi Kon still alive

Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

I was soaking my bones in a riverside rotenburo hot spring when news of anime director Satoshi Kon's death flashed across my cell phone via text message from Tokyo. Must be a macabre joke, I thought at first glance, though the friend who sent it isn't given to jabs of dark humor.

Maybe a promotional gambit for Kon's next work? His films are characterized in part by multiple realities and unexpected shifts among them, so that just when you think something is really happening, perhaps it isn't. After all, typing or even thinking about the phrase, "the late Satoshi Kon," just didn't feel right.

But I returned to Tokyo and the banal and humbling truth: Kon, one of the most gifted, innovative and searchingly intelligent artists working in the anime medium and the film world at large, died on the morning of Aug. 24 from pancreatic cancer--at the age of 46.

As a director, Kon made four features--Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika--and was at work on his fifth, The Dream Machine. Eerily, he appeared to be especially active and lively in recent weeks, as the Internet buzzed with fans from East and West accusing American live-action director Christopher Nolan of plagiarizing ideas from Paprika for his Hollywood blockbuster, Inception.

Responding to the controversy on his blog, "Kon's Tone" (http://konstone.s-kon.net/modules/

notebook/archives/565), earlier this month, the anime director gently brushed aside fan complaints, noting that most artists are influenced by others and identifying examples in his own work--though he neglected to add that in his case, source materials have been openly acknowledged, in particular John Ford's 1948 Western, 3 Godfathers, on which Kon loosely based Tokyo Godfathers.

Last autumn, I gave a talk at a symposium on anime hosted by the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Paprika was screened and discussed. Befittingly, my fellow panelists and I spoke of the film in language usually reserved for literature and other works of so-called "high art." There was so much to see and ponder in a Kon film. I screened Paprika again this summer for students in an anime seminar at Temple University in Tokyo. Each time I watch it, I see more.

"Looking at his overall achievements as a director, writer and artist, Kon was working on the same level as Hayao Miyazaki at his peak," says veteran anime critic Helen McCarthy, author of nine books on the medium, including the exhaustive and essential The Anime Encyclopedia: Japanese Animation Since 1917. Feeling helpless in grief, I reached out to McCarthy in London, and to other friends and authors worldwide.

McCarthy casts our loss into sharp perspective. "If Miyazaki had died at 46, we wouldn't have My Neighbor Totoro. At 46, Tezuka hadn't published Black Jack, or MW, or created some of his greatest short films. At 46, Hitchcock hadn't even got as far as Stage Fright. Just think what we might have had from Satoshi Kon at 50, or 60." She praises Kon's capacity to filter a childlike vision and playfulness through sophistication and aesthetic mastery. "For me, the uniqueness of his art is that, as well as the child remaining an artist, the artist remained a child."

American animation historian, critic and author Charles Solomon highlights Kon's unique technical skills as a craftsperson. At a time when gripes about formulaic anime abound, "Kon stands out as a creator of unsettling originality. Many directors use flashbacks and dream sequences, but few could match Kon's skill at integrating those elements into the narrative. Kon was one of the most interesting and talented directors working in animation--not just in Japan, but in the world."

The world beyond Japan had begun slowly waking to Kon's genius. Tokyo Godfathers received an Oscar nomination in 2003, and Paprika garnered awards and praise in Europe.

"It may have been fortuitous, but Kon's works tended to be very accessible to Westerners," says Andrew Osmond, author of Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, the only English-language book about the director. "He also educated foreigners about Japan. He told me that when Tokyo Godfathers premiered in New York, he was shocked that people were surprised to learn that Tokyo had a homeless problem. [The Kon-directed TV series] Paranoia Agent shows a Japan terrified of its younger generation, and Millennium Actress telescopes centuries of Japanese history, from the Heian era to World War II and beyond."

Tufts University professor and author Susan J. Napier cites Kon's humanism and empathy as transcendent features in his work, comparing him to postwar giants Akira Kurosawa, Kenzaburo Oe and Miyazaki in his "concern for social issues, the problems of being an outsider, and the ultimate fate of modern Japan."

"More than almost any other animator in Japan, [Kon] had truly liberated himself from the preconceptions of what anime should be," adds author Frederik L. Schodt, manga authority and translator. "His films are at the top of my list."

Try it again: "The late Satoshi Kon."

Nope. Still doesn't feel right. Not at all.

Kelts is a Temple University, Japan Campus, lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He also is visiting scholar at The University of Tokyo. He is the author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S." (www.japanamericabook.com).