This is where Christopher Nolan took ideas for the film Inception, and Wachowski for The Matrix. You’ll never guess

The attitude towards anime in our country is about as polarized as towards games from Nintendo. people either really love him or really hate him. If you carefully read what I write on the site, it will become quite clear that I belong to the first category.

With this emphasis, I am launching a series of articles that are in one way or another dedicated to Japanese animation. And today we will look at how it influences Western cinema.

In short, cult films such as “Inception”, “The Matrix”, the work of Guillermo del Toro and Darren Aronofsky, largely inspire and copy the most Japanese “cartoons”, which many have a rather disdainful attitude towards.

Now you will see for yourself and be surprised how many cool things actually have Eastern roots.

Christopher Nolan took the idea for Inception from the anime Paprika by Satoshi Kon.

Almost everyone has heard at least something about Christopher Nolan’s monumental work called Inception. But few people know that in many ways this project is not unique, very much inspired by the anime film by Satoshi Kon called “Paprika”.

The anime was based on the novel Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui, published in 1993. This work tells the story of a female psychiatrist who becomes involved in a project to create a device that can penetrate other people’s dreams.

Leading the team working on this office, Atsuko Chiba decides to use it without the doctor’s permission to help patients, going beyond the scope of research. In her actions, she relies on the image of “Paprika” – an eighteen-year-old girl who lives in a world of dreams.

Christopher Nolan has repeatedly mentioned that he was inspired by the work of Satoshi Kon when working on the film Inception. Some scenes in Inception are simplified visual quotations from Paprika, such as the scene in which Ellen Page’s character Ariadne touches a mirrored wall.

The Matrix has a lot of visuals and ideas from Specter as a whole.

Well, almost everyone who has watched a movie at least once in their life knows about The Matrix. The work, then still done by the Wachowski brothers, blew up the industry, set standard action films for many years, and the incident with time dilation is still remembered and parodied.

The first “Matrix” remains one of the best representatives of post-cyberpunk and, probably, the most respectful bow to Mamoru Oshii and his “Ghost in the aggregate.”

Yes, The Matrix does not copy the general plot of the anime work about Major Motonoko Kusanagi from the 9th Security Division. But both artistic and narrative techniques were largely copied. For example, meme-like green hieroglyphs on a green background are part of the Ghost in the Shell interface (as is the idea of ​​​​connecting a clock to a person’s head).

And also in the plot there is a mysterious hacker here and there, only in the case of “Ghost” it is an antagonist under the pseudonym “Puppeteer”. The very idea that the development of the Internet and artificial intelligence can lead to the replacement of people with machines (including those that look identical to people) is almost the same.

John Wick came from the anime “Cowboy Bebop”

One of Shinchiro Watanabe’s works recently ruined Netflix, adapted into a Western series called Cowboy Bebop.

Unlike this craft, film scholars are still analyzing film language. original works that eat the brain open on this day in the tops of the best songs in the industry.

The anime Cowboy Bebop has nothing to do with the Wild West. According to the plot, the action takes place in the distant future and tells about the adventures of a group of bounty hunters, in particular, Spike Spiegel, one of its members. At first glance, Spike seems like a simple good guy, but his past and fate turn out to be much darker than one might expect.

Think about what all this has to do with John Wick? Quite straightforward, actually.

Chad Stahelski has repeatedly declared his love for the works of Shinichiro Watanabe. His admiration was so strong that he even partially used some of the ideas of his Eastern colleague in his film, for example, about a syndicate of professional killers. According to rumors, the ending of John Wick 4 turned into an almost complete repetition of the ending of Cowboy Bebop precisely in order to pay tribute to Mr. Watanabe.

And it bore fruit. Right now, MARRA studio is working on the anime series “Lazarus”. Shinichiro Watanabe sits in the director’s chair, and Chad Stahelski is responsible for staging the action scenes. We are really looking forward to the release sometime in 2025.

Pacific Rim has collected almost all the ideas of the mecha anime genre.

Honestly, I would like to see Guillermo del Toro’s name heard more often in the media. It’s been a long time since this good fat guy (he thinks so himself, this is not fat shaming) Uncle didn’t order us cool horrors and atmospheric films in general. However, in his films there is one extremely interesting “Pacific Rim”, which is nothing more than the most authoritative look at mecha anime.

First, let me make it clear. The “mecha” genre in anime is a very conventionally designated manifestation, where part of the plot is somehow built around battles on huge robots. This setting could cover issues ranging from cyberpunk to war dramas to post-apocalypse. It is within the framework of the latter that “Pacific Rim” works.

In the story, the world was attacked by kaiju (a Japanese word meaning “strange beast” or “monster.” The most famous kaiju is Godzilla) – giant monsters that came from the countries of the European continent. To transfer them, the “Jager” program was developed – huge robots that are always controlled strictly by a pair of people, whose consciousness is intertwined as one.

Well, what does anime and Japanese culture have to do with it, the reader will ask. And despite the fact that del Toro’s first film in general, and the entire Frontier franchise in particular, is one big reference to various mecha anime about negotiations with kaiju.

Visual and narrative references to the cult “Evangelion”, and “Jaegers” themselves are strongly reminiscent of “Gundams” from the anime franchise of the same name, and even Hideo Kojima himself said that “Pacific Rim” is a film for hardcore otaku (manga and anime fans) and only for them.

Perfect Sadness by Darren Aronofsky

We started today and at the end with the work of Satoshi Kon. Only this time we will talk about the film “Perfect Sadness” released in 1997. The work itself demands worthy attention, but the context of its treatment of one director forces us to reconsider his approach to creativity altogether.

What could a story with such a poetic name be about? About addiction, manic obsession with another person, persecution and severe self-deception. And what about director Darren Aronofsky with his “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan”? It’s simple.

Aronofsky was so inspired by the work of Satoshi Kon that he bought all the rights to “Perfect Sadness” and in his two films used both visual techniques and a semantic thread about a person who is not who he claims to be.

For example, in both “Requiem” and “Swan”, there is a scene where the heroine sits in the bathtub in the fetal position, trying to hide from the pain and be reborn, but in vain. These scenes from the anime “Perfect Sadness” were literally reshot frame by frame and literally carry the same meaning.

“Ideal Sadness” in general is rightfully considered one of the significant developing industries. It was referenced by David Lynch in Mulholland Drive, and even Madonna used footage from the anime as show footage on her European tour.

But there are many counter-examples

If you go deeper, you can find official good examples of inspiration and borrowing. For example, the entire JRPG genre was born from the Japanese craze for the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons and the computer game Wizardry.

Films “Escape from New York” and “Escape from Los Angeles” (they were directed by John Carpenter) inspired Hideo Kojima to create the very first part of Metal Gear. Actually, the characters of Solid Snake and Big Boss are literally a repetition of Snake Pliskin from those films.

Well, you can write a whole separate article about how the eternally young Hirohiko Araki creates his “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”. In short, every manga is simply saturated with the authors’ references to American culture and British folklore.

What am I getting at?: Japan in the past was a closed country and largely cut off from the outside world. But globalization has opened up all the plastic arts in this country to the world, which is not a shame to inspire many great artists.

And it’s always better to learn something new than to write that all this “children’s cartoons from the countries of strange people!“

I am voicing this thought to you. Have a good day!