by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

In between his two classic anime films, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, the late Satoshi Kon created his only anime for television. An icon and master of diverse visual storytelling in his films (a style that would be emulated by Western filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis), Kon brought his eye to the small screen in spectacular fashion.

The anime in question was Paranoia Agent, which I would, personally, call a psychological noir. The story is set in motion when Tsukiko Sagi, a character designer responsible for the pink dog character Maromi, is attacked on her way home from work. The assailant is a young, middle school aged boy, wearing a pair of gold inline skates and a baseball bat. The weapon is, quite iconically, a golden, bent baseball bat. He gets away, but he earns the name “Lil’ Slugger” from the public. At least in the English version. In Japanese, his name is “Shōnen Batto” - which is literally just “Bat Boy.” I like Lil’ Slugger more, but mostly because I think it’s a really nice piece of localization and translation. It rules and is as iconic as his own character design.

The series then follows an interesting cast of characters, from a girl with DID (dissociative identity disorder), to a girl who finds out her father’s been recording her undress, to a group of three people who meet on a suicide message board. Almost every one of the thirteen episode run follows someone new - and how their lives end up manifesting Lil’ Slugger. The connective tissue are the detectives who are investigating these attacks, Tsukiko, and the ever present Maromi who is, perhaps, one of the most popular characters in the Japan of this world. And, of course Lil’ Slugger is ever present. But what they all have in common, and it becomes very clear, very quickly, is that they are all people backed into corners. They’re all dealing with heavy issues like mental illness, trauma, and isolation, which manifests Lil’ Slugger to come and knock their proverbial loose screws back into place. 

When Paranoia Agent first aired in 2004 in the US, it did so on Adult Swim. Which is where I watched it. At the entirely too young ages of 11 and 12, since it started before my birthday and wrapped up after it. I’ve been saying for years, literally more than a decade, that Paranoia Agent is one of my favorite animes ever. I’ve talked to so many people about it - including my college writing professor, who also loved the show. (The circumstances of sitting in that office and taking office hours to just talk about anime was buck wild and very fun. Perhaps one of my favorite college memories, if I’m being honest.)

But it’s been over fifteen years since I first saw it on Adult Swim, where I’d been watching more adult anime outside of the Toonami kids block for a few years (my friends and I watched the original North American broadcast of Fullmetal Alchemist when I was in middle school this way, a year before Kon’s one-shot series). But since Paranoia Agent had its English dub rebroadcast for the first time in a decade on Toonami in 2020, it’s fair to say that it’s an anime that kind of lives in the minds of anyone who managed to catch it in the US, especially since it was only recently released on home media here for the first time since the four-part DVDs back in 2004. It’s been a white whale of cerebral anime, honestly. 

All of which is to say that, upon a rewatch, it’s a comfort to know that I had good taste in things at 12, even if I didn’t quite understand them. And with a series like Paranoia Agent, it’s understandable to not understand. It’s a series that, all at once, is both very straight forward with its themes and cerebral in its execution. Like many of Kon’s films, Paranoia Agent plays with form, mixing animation types, to deal with the human condition. 

And deal with the human condition it does. The reveal that the creation of Lil’ Slugger and Maromi are deeply intertwined, is a big one. And it’s one that allows Kon and writer Seishi Minakami to revel in what trauma responses might look like, and how they might go on to alter the worlds of not just the person immediately traumatized, but every person in their orbit. Because that’s kind of the ultimate message in Paranoia Agent, that trauma is parasitic. 

As the legend of Lil’ Slugger grows and grows, we see people like Makoto Kozuka, a young boy who suffers from Chuunibyou syndrome (which is a mostly Japanese idea of teen and young children who have delusions of grandeur - though it’s Western roots might be found in something like Peter Pan syndrome). He thinks he’s Lil’ Slugger and that he’s a great warrior who’s meant to beat back the darkness. But Makoto ends up committing suicide in a jail cell as the detectives slowly, too slowly, realize he’s not actually Lil’ Slugger.

We also meet people like Naoyuki Saruta, who works on the anime that’s being made within the show about Maromi (and a little boy with a golden bat that she’s emotionally attached to). He constantly causes problems for the production of the anime (though we get a really nice explainer of how anime is made, and what all the roles actually mean), and eventually Lil’ Slugger chases him down while he’s driving and beats him to death.

But the thing about Lil’ Slugger, the biggest thing about Paranoia Agent, is that none of it's real. Well, the trauma is real. The pre-teen boy chasing random people down with a bat and bashing their brains in? Not so much. Instead, he’s a creation of a pre-teen Tsukiko, who was too traumatized by the start of her period, the death of her dog, and what her father might do because of the accident involving the original Maromi. He was a trauma response - so it’s no coincidence that Lil’ Slugger returns when she’s dealing with the extreme stress of trying, and failing, to create a new character. It’s just that this time, the trauma is parasitic, and it infects the minds and hearts of the people who hear about it. 

Paranoia Agent very much rules. It’s visually arresting, the themes are timeless, and the character design is truly iconic. But, it’s also very much a product of its time. There are certainly things in the series that could, and would, be handled differently today - even to a similar effect within the actual story. It’s a much less modern look at mental health, but that’s to be expected given the era in which it was produced.

But with the passing of Satoshi Kon in 2010, it’s likely we’ll never get a story quite like the ones he liked telling. And he was smart enough to recognize that the ideas he had for this story, in particular, needed more than the length of a film to fully be realized. Which is something I always really respect in a creative force, which Kon most certainly was. The show reminds us that everything is cyclical, that we will always be in the eternal castle of recurring dreams - and that’s true of Kon’s work. His legacy lives on, not just in the work he made, but in the works of other filmmakers - and Paranoia Agent is certainly part of that eternal castle that Kon has gifted to us. And I’m happy to be lost there, with all our beautiful, maddening recurring dreams.