Paranoia Agent

Publisher
Geneon / MVM
Director
Satoshi Kon
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Series
Running time
13 episodes / 25 minutes
Year
2004

Paranoia Agent

By Aki
27th Nov 06

I’m not sure whether to start out by describing this anime as really very good, or just weird. The frustrating thing is, it doesn’t seem too ‘out-there’ when you first see it, it’s just a little dark and morbid, with intriguing, unexplained goings-on, but it stays too vague for too long.
We start off with Sagi Tsukiko, a well-known artist who created a very popular anime or manga character called Moromi-chan. Tsukiko gained a lot of recognition with her character, and now the pressure is on at work to create another successful character by a certain deadline.
Tsukiko is very quiet, and almost comes across as depressed most of the time. It’s obvious that she’s not well-liked by her co-workers because of her success, and she’s also not very confident about her ability to create another popular character like Moromi. Then one night, as she’s walking home, she is attacked by an elementary school age boy with a bat.
This is the first in a string of similar attacks. The local police have two detectives looking into the crimes, following victims to question them, and looking for suspects. It quickly becomes clear that all the victims of the attacker—who is known as Shonen Bat—are connected. We also notice that all the victims are at a point in their life when they feel trapped, with no way out and nowhere to go. That is when they are attacked, and in fact all of them seem relieved that they had become victims of Shonen Bat.
As we realize how this plot line works, we are expecting to eventually be told exactly how all these victims are related, and why Shonen Bat has singled them all out for his attacks. We also want to know how it is that he knows all these people, and how he knows exactly when they are at their lowest, most hopeless point in life.
But just as the series settles into this routine, and we start to be able to predict when Shonen Bat will appear to knock someone over the head, the plot takes a completely wild turn and simply throws you for a loop. One of the obvious intended victims, who had all the proper criteria—he was a security guard forced to resort to stealing in order to pay off a debt, and he was related in one way or another to previous victims—should have been attacked by Shonen Bat just like the rest of them, and certainly he would have been relieved that someone had brought his crime-spree to an end. But instead, Shonen Bat’s attack fails, the security guard catches him, and now the boy attacker is in police custody, being questioned.
And that’s where things start to get really weird. Shonen Bat admits to only some of his crimes, and the video-game manner in which he describes them makes us think that maybe he’s a little crazy. Now we are left wondering which of the victims were actually attacked. But not too long after the police get their confession, Shonen Bat is murdered in his cell—by Shonen Bat.
At this point, the show throws in several episodes that are seemingly unrelated to the immediate plot line. We deviate from the series of attacks to focus on three people who are trying to kill themselves, a group of chatty ladies who gossip about ridiculous stories concerning Shonen Bat, and a man who hates his job and apparently murders his co-workers.
The last two episodes finally reveal enough of the answers we were looking for to give it a satisfying finish, despite the few loose ends that give it a bit of that cycle-that-never-ends feel. And in fact, after the last hour, just about everything about the show that you’ve seen so far makes perfect sense, even the title ‘Paranoia Agent’ and the initial opening sequence with random people making a million excuses.
I guess the problem is, Paranoia Agent just took too long getting to the explanation. By episode eleven in a thirteen-episode series, I was almost ready to put it down and never finish it (despite the fact that there were only two episodes left) simply because things were too confusing, too vague, and the episodes just seemed to be stalling. After seeing the end though, I think it’s a series that would be better appreciated on the second or third viewing. I’d say that if you have the patience to get to the end, you’d probably like it, or at least find it morbidly interesting and surprisingly well thought-out.

-- Aki 27th Nov 06

Paranoia Agent Images