Birds of Prey’s Cathy Yan will executive produce and direct Paprika, a live-action series based on the Yasutaka Tsutsui novel of the same name. The series will be a collaboration between Amazon Studios and Hivemind, according to Deadline.
Many people know of Paprika because of the 2006 anime film by Satoshi Kon, which is considered by many to be a masterpiece. As Deadline reminds us, “Paprika is a character-driven sci-fi series with a mind-bending narrative centering around a technology that allows us to invade people’s dreams.” Many works have been compared to Paprika, including Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which has a very similar premise.
Yan famously became the first Asian woman to direct a big-budget superhero movie–Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn—in 2020. (Chloé Zhao became the second in 2021 with Eternals.) A lot of the visual stylings and directorial choices Yan made bled directly into The Suicide Squad, as Harley Quinn’s flair for the fantastic carried over into James Gunn’s film. I’m sure that anime purists might bemoan yet another live-action adaptation of their favorite story, but I gotta say that Yan’s eccentric eye and flair for the dramatic will undoubtedly render Paprika an incredible experience.
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