If you don’t deal with your demons, they will deal with you

Late anime director Satoshi Kon created and directed the 2004 anime series Paranoia Agent. In 2020, Toonami picked up the series for broadcast for my viewing pleasure. It follows a timid character designer known as Tsukiko Sagi who gains fame from a pink dog mascot known as Maromi. Under pressure from higher-ups to imitate and essentially mass produce her prior success, she finds herself knocked unconscious by a mysterious boy on golden skates wielding a crooked gold bat. The detectives on the scene, Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwa, don’t fully buy the story until another victim shows up and after that come more and more victims of the attacks. Every victim has essentially the same description of the perp: young buy with inline skates, a crooked bat, and a baseball cap. There’s two names for the kid in sub and dub: the sub refers to him as Golden Bat; and the dub refers to him as Lil’ Slugger. The dub name for the “antagonist” might be some holdover from times past, but I prefer Golden Bat because it’s one of the most identifiable objects on the antagonist’s person.

From a plot standpoint, Kon’s creation is a mystery thriller with some psychological horror blended into this cocktail. You don’t know who the antagonist is beyond the victim’s descriptions so that nails down the mystery. He’s a serial assaulter who attacks without warning, which adds to the thriller elements. And the psychological horror element has to do with the nature of the attacks. Post-assault all of the characters can consistently describe what was going on when they were attacked and what the assailant looked like or was wielding, but prior to that just about every one of them has some sort of mental health condition that makes them somewhat unreliable. That, or they’re some kind of opportunist with an ulterior motive or they’re hiding a deep, dark secret that they’d rather bring with them to the grave than make peace with.

For character design, knowing Japanese kinda spoils the main plot, which I’ll get to momentarily, but only if you know what kanji is being used and how. The main element to them all is animal based and is also based on their nature with a double entendre to boot for some characters, notably those with a mental disorder of some kind. From what I recall of the anime when Toonami broadcast it, it starts with the victims of Golden Bat before transitioning to detectives Ikari and Maniwa, but doesn’t want you to forget that Tsukiko and her creation, Maromi, are the first people who’re introduced in the series, despite transitioning to other characters.

It also has something of a supernatural element to Golden Bat. We’re gonna venture into spoiler territory right about now, so if you wanna open another tab and blaze through the series, you’re welcome to do so. Interspersed with the genuine attacks against them, there was a copycat perpetrator who personally singled out some of the victims while the real culprit was still at large and incidentally the real culprit was the one who killed the copycat while the copycat was in police custody, thereby ruining Ikari’s and Maniwa’s careers as detectives.

Disgraced and kicked to the curb, Ikari and Maniwa handle expulsion for f[metal clanking]ng up the case so royally in different ways. Ikari finds himself as extra help at a construction site that seemingly scoops up what society tosses out not the least of which was an ex-convict that Ikari himself arrested ages ago. Maniwa, meanwhile, doesn’t necessarily quit working on the case just because he no longer has a badge.

Ikari and Maniwa fill the buddy cop dynamic that I haven’t really seen since Rush Hour and wouldn’t again until Taiho Shichauzo. Ikari is the gruff, older, experienced cop who doesn’t have room for surprises anymore. His belief in the supernatural is as tight as the victims’ grips on reality and what especially makes the gears grind against each other is that his family’s future was torn apart. His wife, Misae, was expecting a child, but due either to a mishap or medical condition, she miscarried. Worse still, her health deteriorated significantly toward the end of the series.

Based on that description, she would be a prime target for the likes of Golden Bat to strike, considering he had an affinity for striking the mentally or even physically unwell throughout the series. But Misae in her final hours proved to be an indestructible show of force, refusing to let this manifestation of everyone’s darkest insecurities destroy her, even if her body is failing her.

Maniwa is Ikari’s counterpart. Young, bright, and more flexible than his older partner who’d rather stick to tradition than explore nifty and novel ideas to crime-stopping and problem-solving. While on the case, Ikari doesn’t even bother to explore the paranormal elements, writing them off as unintelligible drivel, but Maniwa examines these more closely, sometimes letting his own sanity get violently abused just to reach a conclusive answer. If it gets results I suppose… but I’m not so sure this would be advised outside of undercover work. Max Payne pushed it with his vigilantism while undercover in the Punchinello family, and the Valkyr trips were done to him than him doing it himself. Maniwa chooses to dance with the devil for a bit to parse what separates most of these cases.

Now the series does return to Sagi at the end to reveal that the pink dog mascot, Maromi, was in fact based on Sagi’s pet dog when she was a child who was run over by a car. Fearing reprisal for being an irresponsible dog owner, she makes up a false story that a random bat-wielding psycho clubbed the dog to death, and has lived with the lie for ages until she finally confronts the truth and confesses that she let the dog go. Clearly, this isn’t the series that deals with right or wrong, nor does it roll the die on its setup. Kon’s work on this was based on a bunch of ideas that were drafted during the production of some of his other movies, Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers. I’m really not well versed in anime movies, in fact, rare magmatic take: most anime movies disappoint me greatly, and that extends to modern day films like the Chainsaw Man: Reze movie. I read the manga already and as much as I wanna see it animated, when it comes to movie adaptations of manga arcs, it felt to me that a lot needed to be sacrificed to truncate it to a specific runtime. And that’s only of manga to movie adaptations; Kon’s original movies might be different, but who knows?

Anyway, Kon stated at the time that working on movies required his undivided attention from beginning to end whereas a TV series, least of all a semi-anthology series like Paranoia Agent allowed for more creativity from episode to episode. And I get that, similar to how I get some of the logic behind most anthology series, or back when they actually mattered video game DLCs and expansion packs. Nothing wrong with linear series, in fact, doing them right leaves players and in the case of film, moviegoers, with a lasting experience, but sometimes you wanna do something different.

The director of this series was promptly sacked for being 0.2 seconds late. .·°՞(˃ ᗜ ˂)՞°·.

I admit that this is the only Satoshi Kon production I can name that I’ve seen, partially or fully, but I recommend it nonetheless for the mystery thriller angle by itself. Especially if you enjoy series like Taiho Shichauzo/You’re Under Arrest or Columbo. Roughly all the details are there for you to see in real time, but to uncover each one requires close examination of each detail to a Maniwa-like level. Perhaps even re-examining the same scenes once or twice to see what is missed or will come back later in the episode or the next one. Also, red herrings. Red herrings everywhere.