The Best Paprika Quotes, Every Line Verified

Paprika is a film in which half the dialogue is meant to sound like nonsense, which makes it a trap for quote pages: a garbled line can be the film working or the transcription failing, and from outside the two look alike. The Wikiquote transcription records the film twice, under one heading for the Japanese version and another for the English version, and the wording under the two headings differs a great deal. It does not say which subtitle release or dub each comes from, so neither do we; each line below says which heading it sits under, or that both headings agree. Eight lines follow, with the scene that gives each its weight. The Chairman's lines discuss the ending, so this page contains spoilers.

“And now, boys and girls, it's show time!” — Paprika

The film's first line, from Wikiquote's English heading. The Japanese heading gives the same moment as “It's the greatest show time!”, which keeps the stiff borrowed English of a stage announcement. The English version adds an audience and turns Paprika into the host of a children's show, and for this film that is the better choice. The plot runs on whose show a dream is: Atsuko Chiba enters patients' dreams to treat them, and whoever stole the DC Mini starts pushing one shared parade into other people's heads. A host who greets the crowd before anything else is the right first note for a story about who gets to run the spectacle.

“Don't you think dreams and the internet are similar?” — Paprika

The line most Paprika quote lists lead with, and the weakest idea in the film. Both Wikiquote headings agree on the wording, which is rare on this page, and the agreement is a clue: there is nothing here to translate except a 2006 metaphor. Paprika says it to Detective Konakawa, whose trouble is cinema, not networks. Michael Toole's Anime News Network essay on Kon describes him as a former film enthusiast who, as a student, quit a film project before it was finished and joined the police, and singles out the scene where Paprika quizzes him on film terms until she wonders whether people dream in pan focus. That comparison, dreams and movies, is the film's real one and the sharper of the two. A comparison to the internet dates with the internet; the camera grammar Konakawa explains does not.

“Even the five court ladies danced in sync to the frog's flutes and drums. The whirlwind of recycled paper was a sight to see. It was like computer graphics.” — Doctor Shima, excerpt from a longer speech

Under Wikiquote's Japanese heading, from a speech Doctor Shima gives in a meeting about the stolen device. Justin Sevakis's Anime News Network review says that within minutes of the theft's discovery the department chief starts spouting nonsense and leaps from a fifth-story window. The speech is how the film shows a dream overriding a waking mind: the words arrive first, and the pictures follow later. Toole recalls being lost in the theater until the parade of frogs, gates and appliances turned up, and adds that the paper whirlwind does appear later, as CG. The gibberish runs on a schedule. No single English wording owns it, either: the English heading renders the passage differently, and Toole's essay quotes a third version.

“It was a rush job, but I put an access function to it. Morals, responsibilities... I don't really get that adults' stuff. But let's talk it over again. We're friends, right?” — Doctor Tokita

Tokita invented the DC Mini, and this line, from the Japanese heading, is how he talks about building it; Wikiquote gives no stage direction for whom he says it to. Toole describes a man who invents without visible effort and eats without noticing the food, and points out that Tokita is voiced by Tohru Furuya, the voice of Amuro Ray, which gives him a boyish voice inside an enormous body. The line asks to be treated as a child. Atsuko refuses that elsewhere in the transcript, telling him his irresponsibility cost lives. CBR notes that the film ends up pairing the two romantically, which can feel sudden to viewers who have not read Tsutsui's novel. With that ending in view, this is the line the romance has to get past: she can love the boy without accepting the excuse.

“What good is a scientist to mankind if he doesn't care about people?” — Atsuko Chiba, excerpt from a longer line

The strongest objection to Atsuko is that she is the film's least warm hero. Sevakis calls her the straight-laced, strict and cold voice of science; Toole calls her outwardly icy and clinical. So the cold scientist accusing a colleague of not caring about people looks like projection. The objection does not hold. In both ANN accounts her own use of the DC Mini is therapy for a troubled detective, and her chill is manner where Tokita's carelessness is method. The Japanese heading makes the rebuke harder: there she asks how a mad scientist can know what a human mind is, which turns a moral complaint into a professional one.

“Paprika, is the inside of my head this messed up?” — Detective Konakawa

Wikiquote's Japanese heading places this as the parade seeps into Konakawa's dream, and the joke is that the mess is not his. CBR describes the parade as the dream virus taking over people's minds. His own nightmare has a single subject: a recurring chase through a hall toward a shooting victim who, according to a second CBR piece, turns out to be himself, the young man who wanted to make films and gave it up for police work. The question commits him to an inquiry the film answers in his favor. Toole writes that a major part of the film is about his facing up to that abandoned, unfinished story, and in the last scene, as Rebecca Silverman's ANN feature puts it, he is finally able to go to the movies.

“I will not allow arrogant scientific technology to intrude onto this holy ground.” — The Chairman, excerpt from a longer line

From Wikiquote's English heading; the Japanese heading has “intrude in this holy ground.” The usual reading makes the Chairman a conservative crank defending dreams from science, and Sevakis supplies the official version of that position: the Chairman was already close to shutting the project down, believing his staff had intruded on the last refuge science had not reduced to data. The film then takes the position apart. CBR says his real motive surfaces when the walls between dream and reality break down: he reaches for Osanai's body so that he can walk again. Toole notes that he watches the early proceedings from a wheelchair. A man who wants a stolen body has no quarrel with arrogant technology. His objection is only that it is in someone else's hands.

“There are no boundaries in dreams. No restrictions from one's own physical body.” — The Chairman, excerpt from a longer line

From the English heading, spoken, Wikiquote notes, while he is a gigantic whale. Set it beside Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, who says she feels confined, “only free to expand myself within boundaries.” Both films are about a mind that wants out of its body. Oshii's grants the wish and treats the result as a birth, ending with Kusanagi in a new body. Kon's treats the same wish as theft, because the Chairman's freedom needs somebody else's body and everyone else's dreams. The Japanese heading ends the speech with “Including me! I will also be free!”, a confession the English version softens to “Even for someone like me!”

Where these sit in the wider corpus: the quote index, the cross-series shelf, and another film about a mind leaving its body in the Ghost in the Shell ending explainer. Verification method, as always, at our notes.