Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Pop star crossing over to being an actress finds herself stalked and questioning her own identity.
Biased, pithy comments: Anime tends to be exploding robots, jokey samurai, and/or William Gibson-esque cyberstuff. Heroes, princesses, villians, and women in short skirts are the rage. This is none of those things---it's a drama, a psycho-thriller, clearly influenced by ``Basic Instinct'' (which in turn steals from Hitchcock grandly). As anime, it's definitely different, and perhaps should be rewarded with a higher rating, but by walking outside the genre films, one finds oneself comparing it to the movies it aspires to be---namely, Hitchcock. Here, I find it a little wanting---the rotoscoped animations give it a fairly realistic feel, but the blocky character design (probably in response to the rotoscoping) and limp voice acting (in the American dub I saw) leave it far behind such twisted films as, say, ``Malice.'' The writing, too, seems to leave details out as needed and suffers from the ``We're being stalked by serial killers, so let's ignore it and pretend to go about our business," school of writing, rather than the ``Hire a security guard and pack heat'' school of writing. So, as an anime it's probably groundbreaking, but as a psycho-thriller it's only so-so. Your mileage may vary.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto.
Directed by: Satoshi Kon