“Perfect Blue” received rave reviews from critics and audiences alike but I think it’s one of the worst anime films I’ve seen. I don’t even know why it is an animated film because there’s nothing in here that could not be done in live-action. This psychological thriller is as sleazy and unpleasant as you can get; it’s like “Silence of the Lambs”, “Cape Fear” and “Showgirls” all rolled into one.

Japanese celebrity Mima quits the pop music business as she hopes to make it an actress. Her sense of reality begins to weaken when she is stalked by a sinister fan and she is consistently confronted by visions of herself as a pop singer.

The characters in this movie are not interesting. I did not care about Mima at all and in a movie such as this, you really need to be invested in the main character. The creepy male fan is the just so over-the-top; he has weird eyes, jagged teeth, greasy hair and his room covered in photos of Mima. The other characters are pretty awful too. The characters look pretty bad when you compare it to other anime films such as “Akira”, “Ghost In The Shell” and anything Studio Ghibli has done.

I must warn people that “Perfect Blue” is definitely not a film for children. I found the violence and nudity throughout to be very graphic and there are some mature themes such as stalking, rape and mental illness covered. The animation is lousy, the characters are boring, the violent and sexual imagery comes across as perverse and it takes so many twists and turns that it loses all sense of direction. I just hated this movie and I do not get why it is so popular. Watch “Akira”, “Ghost In The Shell”, “Spirited Away” or heck, even the “Pokémon” film I saw was better than this.