The second season of The Human Instrumentality Podcast follows the career of whose brief-but-brilliant oeuvre is a parade of quirky and beguiling works, including Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, Kon’s psychedelic and psychological parade of images and characters celebrate the animated film tradition and critique the society that created it – and the fans that enable its existence.
But we’re not just going to talk about Kon the filmmaker — we’re going to use his career to survey the history of anime’s golden age, its breakthrough in the west, and the murderer’s row of often-unrecognized talent that gave it life.
This first episode covers the earliest part of Kon’s career, his first published works as a Manga artist, and his time as an assistant to Katushiro Otomo during the creation of maybe the most beloved film in Japanese animation: Arika.