The coolest anime I've seen this year, by far, is Satoshi Kon's Paprika, a mind-blowing sci-fi thriller that stands as one of the best animated films of the year. You won't see anything else like Paprika on DVD this holiday season and it's just further proof that Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers) is one the current masters of anime. There may be no one that can touch Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away), but Paprika might get people to start saying that no one can touch Satoshi Kon. He's a visual master and Paprika contains some of the most amazing animated sequences in years. It's a movie about dreams that will make the viewer feel like they're in another imaginary world themselves. It's a must-buy for the anime fan in your family this holiday season.

Dreams and movies have a long history together, something that Kon even plays with in Paprika. Cinema is a way of seeing our dreams realized on the big screen. In the world of Paprika, a company has found a way to look into someone else's dreams. They can then view the dreams and analyze them to find hidden psychological secrets. But the technology gets stolen and someone starts entering other people's dreams against their will. Then the dream world and the real world start to blend as the line between the two collapses and the already imagination-filled Paprika gets really trippy and impossible to take your eyes off.

The plot of Paprika is good and the voice work is consistent but it's the visual energy that makes the film a must-see. You might think that a movie about dreams is easy, but pulling off a film as complex as Paprika and not making it feel like a jumbled mess takes a lot of skill. The dream world of Paprika brilliantly captures the surreal, sexy, dangerous, weird qualities of our own sleeping states but also has an easy-to-follow plot at its center. That's an amazing feat and there are very few directors as talented as Kon who could have pulled it off. And Sony gives the film the kind of technical treatment it needed to really bring the experience home. The widescreen picture is perfect and the 5.1 original language audio mix is one of the best of recent anime releases. Paprika is primarily a sensory experience and the video and audio help the film work better than it would have with a lesser technical treatment.

The DVD for Paprika comes with a nicer-than-average collection of special features. A lot of anime releases figure that the film itself is enough of a special feature and don't offer much in the way of extras, but Paprika has a commentary by the filmmaker, a great featurette about Kon and the writer of the original book that the film is based on, a conversation featuring both of them and two of the actors, and some intensely detailed behind-the-scenes information on the design of the film. Paprika is going to become a cult classic, a film that breaks out of the hardcore anime genre and becomes a crossover hit. It's nice that Sony gave it a DVD treatment like it has already.