Paranoia Agent: Anime Review

(spoiler free!)

Paranoia Agent has been on my to-watch list for a while, since I've seen all of Satoshi Kon's movies and generally like his work. I had a lot of mixed feelings about this show and want to talk about it, so let's get into it!

Here's a quick summary of the plot:

After work one evening, a popular young character designer stressed about her upcoming deadline gets suddenly assaulted by a young boy on rollerblades with a bat. Soon afterwards, various people all over the city begin to claim they have also been attacked by this boy, known by the media as 'shounen bat', and the citizens began to speculate whether shounen bat is real or a figment of the victims' imaginations.

Knowing that Satoshi Kon's other stories often focus on the disparity between reality/unreality/imagination, I was intrigued. I am critical of many of his portrayals of individuals with mental illness in these stories, but overall enjoy the way he writes about the uncertainty between what is real life and what is not. With this show, the audience is in the same position as the characters. The entire time, you will be questioning who shounen bat really is, and why he exists.

I thought this anime was great for the first couple episodes, but around episode 7, it really stagnates and the quality drops significantly, in my opinion. To me the show seemed like it was reaching its climax at that point, but this is a 13 episode show, so I knew there had to be more of the story left. The episodes in between episode 7 and the finale aren't bad by any means, they just seem to disrupt the flow set by the first several episodes. This is just my opinion though, I'm sure some people may disagree about the pacing issues.

This is a side note, but I also think this show has one of the most unsettling opening songs/animations I've ever seen in anime. It's just deeply unsettling, lol. I don't know how else to describe it. This is a good thing though, I think it captures the mood of the show perfectly.

Overall, if you like some of Satoshi Kon's other works and are curious about Paranoia Agent, I'd say it's definitely worth a watch, but it's not something I'd necessarily recommend, especially to anyone who isn't familiar with Kon's directorial style. But that's just me.

Thank you for reading!

-threecheersforinking