Inside Satoshi Kon’s unfin­ished meta-nightmares

In the months before the beloved Japan­ese ani­ma­tor and man­ga artist Satoshi Kon passed away on 24 August, 2010, he expressed regret that his next film, Dream­ing Machine, might remain unfin­ished. In fact, Kon made it one of his final wish­es that his team attempt to com­plete the film. Masao Maruya­ma, Kon’s long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor and friend, and one of the co-founders of Mad­house stu­dios, seemed to take that on as a per­son­al mis­sion for sev­er­al years, say­ing in 2012 that he hoped to get it done with­in three years with the aid of Kon’s exten­sive notes and tapes about the film.

This would have been Kon’s fifth fea­ture and, con­sid­er­ing the title, a fit­ting fol­low-up to Papri­ka (a film about a lit­er­al dream­ing machine). Yet, while all of his films con­nect in one way or anoth­er, Dream­ing Machine would have stood apart from the rest of Kon’s work. For starters, it was to fea­ture no human char­ac­ters – the pro­tag­o­nist, Riri­cio, is an elder­ly robot who eeri­ly resem­bles the char­ac­ter Papri­ka in appear­ance. More­over, where Kon made his name cre­at­ing adult ani­mat­ed dra­mas such as Per­fect Blue, Dream­ing Machine was intend­ed as a children’s adventure.

In a trans­la­tion of an open let­ter that served as Kon’s final words to the pub­lic, the direc­tor speaks of his regret over how the con­cep­tion of the film was han­dled, and the lim­its of cre­at­ing some­thing as an indi­vid­ual: ​“I’m wor­ried not only about the film itself, but about the staff with whom I was able to work with on the film. After all, there’s a strong pos­si­bil­i­ty that the sto­ry­boards that were cre­at­ed with [our] blood, sweat and tears will nev­er be seen.” Kon adds that he shared as much as he could, although as Maruya­ma lat­er made clear, it’s not easy con­tin­u­ing a work where every sin­gle image was under the direct con­trol of its orig­i­nal creator.

Yoshi­mi Itazu was named as the new direc­tor in 2011, but the fol­low­ing year it was announced that pro­duc­tion had been halt­ed. Maruya­ma has since clar­i­fied that the film has been dropped by Mad­house due to a lack of fund­ing and the fact that they couldn’t find any­one to match Kon’s voice and visu­al style. Maruya­ma left Mad­house to set up MAP­PA, best known for In This Cor­ner of the World, in 2011.

When asked about Dream­ing Machine, Maruya­ma cit­ed the doomed project as part of the rea­son he broke away with MAP­PA, as only 600 of 1500 cuts had been fin­ished. Then in 2017, after Maruya­ma left MAP­PA to form anoth­er stu­dio, Stu­dio M2, he respond­ed to fur­ther ques­tions about the film’s sta­tus: ​“It is like a con­cert, where the star is no longer on the stage.”

In the afore­men­tioned final let­ter from Kon, he express­es a deep sat­is­fac­tion with his career, stat­ing that he ​“per­haps lived more intense­ly than most peo­ple […] In the last 10 plus years, I’ve been able to do what I want as an ani­mé direc­tor, achieve my goals, and get some good reviews.”

Com­plet­ing a film posthu­mous­ly is extreme­ly com­pli­cat­ed – with­out wish­ing to get into argu­ments about auteurism, ani­ma­tion adds fur­ther chal­lenges with the idio­syn­crasies that define its finest cre­ators. The act of draw­ing some­thing is incred­i­bly sub­jec­tive – even a draw­ing of some­thing as plain as a chair will have some kind of indi­ca­tion of the artist’s hand in cre­at­ing it.

Besides, it’s not the only work of Kon’s to have been left unfin­ished, or revis­it­ed posthu­mous­ly. His man­ga with Ghost in the Shell direc­tor Mamoru Oshii, Seraphim 266613336 Wings, was left with­out an end­ing. Sim­i­lar­ly, his ongo­ing man­ga series OPUS ran from 1995 to 1996 until it went on indef­i­nite hia­tus around the time that Kon began work on Per­fect Blue. The sto­ry is clas­sic Kon, nav­i­gat­ing a line between real­i­ty and fic­tion and tak­ing on a wink­ing meta-nar­ra­tive as a man­ga writer named Chikara, strug­gling with a new plot direc­tion for his man­ga, is absorbed into the pages of his cre­ation, and his char­ac­ters realise that their lives are pre-writ­ten. But OPUS also ends abrupt­ly, right in the midst of a game-chang­ing moment.

In 2010, the series was reprint­ed by Toku­ma Shoten, along with an end­ing to the then-incom­plete sto­ry that read­ers at the time nev­er got to see. It’s tak­en direct­ly from man­u­scripts and art­work dis­cov­ered lat­er on, and though it does lit­tle to sooth the abrupt­ness of the story’s orig­i­nal end, there’s an amus­ing angle to it as Kon him­self appears, adding yet anoth­er lay­er to an already metafic­tion­al tale by direct­ly dis­cussing his own prob­lems with author­ship (with a wink­ing ref­er­ence to the also unfin­ished Seraphim). That reprint­ing was trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish and released by Dark Horse Comics in an omnibus edi­tion in 2014.

OPUS may con­tin­ue to find new life breathed into it still, as Maruya­ma has allud­ed on more than one occa­sion to his desire to work on an ani­mé adap­ta­tion at Stu­dio M2 (that said, noth­ing has been green-lit, though com­pos­er Susumu Hira­sawa, who worked on Mil­len­ni­um Actress, Papri­ka and Para­noia Agent, says he has writ­ten a theme for it).

OPUS is a pecu­liar peek behind the cur­tain, par­tic­u­lar­ly with its abridged end­ing, itself becom­ing about the hard real­i­ties that not every sto­ry has the priv­i­lege of being fin­ished. Even if the sto­ry is cut short, there’s still val­ue in see­ing Kon work through those ideas. If we real­ly must readapt Kon’s work, and if any work of his was to find ​‘com­ple­tion’, maybe it should be OPUS – a sug­ges­tion also reached by the folks behind Konol­o­gy.

After all, it’s about an author ced­ing con­trol of their work, and how that might not be such a bad thing. In OPUS, art is some­thing that tru­ly lives beyond its cre­ator, con­stant­ly chang­ing shape. The excite­ment is in that amor­phous­ness, not in whether or not it’s ​‘com­plete’, con­tain­able or set along a lin­ear path. Per­haps Maruya­ma is on the right track with want­i­ng to work on an adap­ta­tion of that man­ga instead. Even if Dream­ing Machine had been com­plet­ed, it’s hard to say whether it real­ly would have been ​‘a Satoshi Kon film’; that film will nev­er tru­ly exist.