“Perfect Blue” is what I think of as a perfect take on how harmful para-social relationships can truly be and dealing with the duality of oneself, and how that can shatter a person from the inside out. In the modern world, there are always going to be two sides to people. The first is the real person which is who they are in real life, and what they are like as a person. Secondly, there is the persona, which is what said person embodies, whether that be an online character or account, on the screen as an actor or actress, or on stage for the whole world to see. 

When it comes to somebody famous, like Mima Kirigoe, the very large majority of people don’t know anything about the personal side of their lives. They like or even fall in love with a persona or an idea of a person without knowing what that person is actually like or even being real in the first place. This is embodied by Me-Mania. He is so obsessed with the character Mima portrays when she was with CHAM, he is completely shattered and torn when Mima breaks that picture of her that he had in his mind when she shifts her career path and portrays herself in a way that the CHAM version of Mima wouldn’t ever do. He is completely able to grasp the fact that Mima in real life is not the same as the Mima that he had thought he knew in his head. 

Mima struggles with knowing what is real and having a solid grasp of reality. The beginning of the movie shows just how ordinary of a life Mima lives. She has a regular old apartment, goes to a regular grocery store like everyone else and even has a computer and video game console. As Mima begins her new career path, this normal identity she holds begins to be slowly warped until she no longer knows what is real and what is fake. This is further embodied by thematic elements that the director, Satoshi Kon, implements, which can be seen when Mima kicks off her acting career with the scene in the strip club. Within this scene, the colors of this movie seem to get brighter and more noticeable. Like Mima’s audience, we, the viewers, are seeing her in a new light. This is what separates her career as a pop singer and her career as an actress further showing the duality that Mima’s character holds. This change has drastic consequences on the physical well-being of Mima she can no longer tell what is real and what seems to be a dream.  Those worlds bleed together, and her day-to-day life turns into a blur. She constantly sees this fairytale version of herself. 

Furthermore, the harmful effect of para-social relationships and duality directly deal with Rumi’s character. She is grief-stricken that Mima decided to quit being a pop star. Even though Rumi knows what Mima is like, she is still obsessed with the popstar persona of Mima. It quite literally fractures her mind that Mima has shifted into this more mature stage of her career. She begins to think that she is Mima and that she is still a pop star. Rumi even goes as far as to pretend to be Mima while being in contact with Me-Mania himself and driving him to think that the real Mima is an imposter or an intruder. 

In conclusion, I honestly really like this movie and think Kon got his point across perfectly with this beautifully animated, stunning, and mind-bending movie of a simple girl. A girl that just wanted to be an actress.