Christopher Nolan has publicly acknowledged that Satoshi Kon — a Japanese animator — made Paprika four years before Inception with the same architecture: dreams folding inside dreams, a spinning object that tests whether you've returned to reality, cityscapes that collapse and rebuild according to the logic of the unconscious. Kon did it on a fraction of the budget. Paprika is on MUBI and is one of the great science fiction films of the 21st century. Tarkovsky's Stalker is the deeper ancestor: a journey into a forbidden zone where your true desires are what you're really afraid of.
The visual style of Paprika was influential, particularly in the way it blurred the lines between fantasy and reality. We were striving for a much more grounded, realistic take on that sort of narrative.
— Christopher Nolan · Film Journal International
Films That Influenced Inception
