Perfect Blue

Perfect Blue is a Japanese horror anime from 1997 about a pop star who fears she is being stalked by a crazed fan.

Perfect Blue features a Japanese girl named Mima who is a pop idol singer in a girl group called “Cham”. In Japan, pop idols don’t make very much money and the group is not very successful, so Mima quits her group and tries to pursue a career as an actress.

She manages to get a small role in a direct-to-video drama, called “Double Bind”. One of her devoted fans is not at all happy about her decision to leave the pop scene. The fan seems to follow her wherever she goes, and Mima’s life starts to become a living hell. She receives hate mail, obscene phonecalls and discovers someone has set up a website that details her every move.

Events in real life start having an errie similarity to her on-screen roles and people close to her start dying. Is she killing them? Is she the stalker or is she really being stalked?

Perfect Blue is a taut psychological thriller, set in modern Japan. It was originally supposed to be a live-action movie which means that, as an anime, it has a very down-to-earth realism that makes it a tense, engrossing, and entirely satisfying film.

Perfect Blue rips through its story at a breakneck pace, and the result is one of the most psychotic pieces of film making ever made. It’s disturbing, freaky and a little bit confusing at first. The way the story progresses means that the viewer is left in the dark about what’s really happening as the main character, and is shocked when the plot twists are revealed.

Perfect Blue is generally considered to be one of the best anime horror movies ever made.