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Michael and Us

PREVIEW - #712 - Perfect Blue (w/ Talking Simpsons)

Michael and Us

Luke Savage and Will Sloan

Society & Culture

4.5696 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In a special collaboration with Bob Mackey and Henry Gilbert of the Talking Simpsons and What A Cartoon! podcasts, we discuss Satoshi Kon's PERFECT BLUE (1997), the anime classic that imagined a world in which obsessive fan culture stoked by the internet leads to the dissolution of one J-pop star's reality. Would you believe that people have called it prescient? PATREON-EXCLUSIVE EPISODE - https://www.patreon.com/posts/712-perfect-blue-157652359

Transcript

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0:00.0

we have a wonderful film, something that's been a long time coming from an artist who,

0:05.0

you know, I think we all appreciate his work a great deal, Satoshi Khan. And I'm very pleased

0:10.4

to have Henry and Bob here, especially because even though I'm a huge fan of Khan's work,

0:16.4

I've seen his four films, but beyond that, you know, I don't know a whole lot about him. And I'm

0:20.6

definitely not an anime guy. So I wonder if off the top here, before we get into, his four films, but beyond that, you know, I don't know a whole lot about him, and I'm definitely

0:20.9

not an anime guy. So I wonder if off the top here, before we get into Perfect Blue, if, you know,

0:27.3

the two of you guys can maybe situate Con a little bit, maybe explain him a bit for people who

0:32.7

may be unfamiliar and kind of talk about the arc of his career. We've a super in-depth, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers.

0:40.7

And so I've delved really deep into his life.

0:44.2

And he, the late Satoshi Kohn, like he started as a manga artist who then kind

0:50.2

of transitioned into the world of animation via the creator of Akira Katsuhiro Atomo.

0:55.6

He was one of Atomo's assistants on Akira.

0:58.1

So that's like what helped him get into the animation world.

1:01.5

And he animated this amazing sequence in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, this one episode that has like this looping timeline thing.

1:10.7

That's just like so amazing that

1:12.2

it made the producers at the animation studio Madhouse really take notice of the guy.

1:17.9

And so then they gave him a chance to direct his own feature.

1:22.1

Missing in his timeline, though, is there he wrote one third of another Atomo project called Memories which is a great animated

1:31.0

anthology film his is the first one called magnetic rose though he did not direct it he only wrote it

1:35.9

but it also is an amazing one that follows a lot of his similar themes and in artistic styles so yeah

1:42.9

and then he got his debut in perfect blue.

1:46.2

Yeah, and only four movies. And I think some important context here is that we might assume that

...

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