There are 4 members in our group for researching an article in Animation- A disciplinary journal, me, Arlo, Alyssa and Cate. We all quickly planned out which article we would research and look at, and we decided on ‘Making sense of the complex Narration in Perfect Blue’. We then discussed who would tackle each part of the article. I chose to do mental health, Alyssa focused on transitions, Arlo focused on Cinematography and Cate focused on  Colour Theory.

I often showed my essay to the others so that I could get guidance on it, and received a lot of feedback on it. My first draft of my essay, which just reviews what happens in the film, Arlo said to dissect the key elements that were relevant to the topic I was studying, she was really helpful in keeping me on the right track to focus on the topics that was relevant to what I was searching for.

Arlo regularly helped out the others in the Discord chat we shared and gave them feedback as well. She was the leader of our group and held everyone together in the group. I mostly came to her for advice and guidance on my own blog.

The group regularly interacted with one another outside of school days, and I’m proud of them for the work they’ve done. I’m not nearly as good as analysing intricacies in the scenes I looked at as they are, I hope to learn more on how to analyse the technical and psychological aspects of the films I look at next time.

For our assignment for Wednesday’s class we had to review an article from Animation- A Disciplinary Journal, and make a presentation on it. For our group, we chose “Making Sense of the Complex Narration in Perfect Blue.”

Making Sense of Complex Narration in Perfect Blue – Antonio Loriguillo-López, José Antonio Palao-Errando, Javier Marzal-Felici, 2020 (sagepub.com)

I helped my team with finding mirrors of both the English and original Dubs for Perfect Blue to watch and analyse the different aspects of narration they were tasked with researching, and I was tasked with analysing the mental health shown in Perfect Blue. I honestly found researching a little bit baffling, as we had to talk about analysing the topics addressed in Perfect Blue in a

specific way, and I had to then put the work I’ve done in an essay on the topic I’ve done. Interacting and showing the others my work helped me figure out what I was doing and what to do.

I created an essay where I discussed everything that happened and what camera angles were used to represent Mima’s degrading mental state, and then I made another essay which had the irrelevant parts removed, and then I looked at a video and some articles to help with my essay. However, videos were not viewed as a reliable source for the essay, so I looked elsewhere to make my essay more professional. I remembered that my classmates posted several links to reliable sources and articles that I could use for my essay.

We interacted more often outside school days, and we also did a bit more inside school days, and we were able to get our presentation done really quickly, and I found myself the only one to have not done everything I needed, because I focused more on my other class on Creative Industries. So, I quickly wrote up this reflection and peer assessment for my group in this class.

On Perfect Blue, I had watched the film before, and returning back to it really opened my eyes to the more complex concepts in the film, though I do remember how Rumi, Mima’s mentor for much of the film, becomes more and more obsessed with preserving Mima’s idol image after Mima leaves to become an actress that she develops dissociative identity disorder and tries to create a personality around that visage, writing a blog that is a one for one replica of the real Mima’s life. She even goes on a killing spree, and is culpable in at least one of the deaths in the movie. Another one perhaps is the photographer who commissioned Mima the pictures for a porn magazine.

At the end of the film Rumi ends up in a mental hospital still enraptured by the Mima persona she created.

In hindsight, I feel I was a bit lost on how best to approach Perfect Blue in an analytical way, first making a document describing what happens in the movie, and then make another essay which focused more on the aspects which showcased how Mima and Rumi’s mental health changed and degraded. We all did a very good job on our presentation and I really do hope we could get to do group work again and do research as well. However, while I feel I did do a good job with the mental health aspect of the film, I forgot to read the “Making sense of the Complex narration in Perfect Blue” article, and got most of my research from other articles that talked about the mental health aspects of Perfect Blue. If I focused on the main article as well as the articles we looked at on our own I feel I could have done a bit better.

Overall I feel I’ve done a good job dissecting the mental aspects of Perfect Blue, and revisiting the film with a more analytical eye after such a long time watching it the first time helped me learn more about the psychological aspects of the characters and how their mental health changes throughout the film. I really hope I can get to dissect how a character’s mental health changes throughout a film the next chance I get.