from IndieWire's 100 best movies of the '90s list.

When Satoshi Kon died from pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the tragically premature age of 46, not only did the film world lose one of its greatest storytellers, it also lost one of its most gifted seers. No one had a more accurate grasp on how the digital age would see fiction and reality bleed into each other on the most private levels of human perception, and all four of the wildly different features that he made in his brief career (along with his masterful TV show, “Paranoia Agent”) are bound together by a shared preoccupation with the fragility of the self in the shadow of mass media. Kon’s dreamlike work so deeply reflects his prescient understanding of the breakdown between personal identity and the collective unconscious that his 1997 debut is still the movies’ single most lucid portrait of someone dissociating from their online persona — this despite being an 81-minute anime made so early in the internet’s lifecycle that its young heroine needs to be taught how to find her own website.

But if someone else is responsible for building “Mima’s Room,” how does the site’s blog seem to know more about Mima’s thoughts and anxieties than she does herself? Transformatively adapted from a pulpy novel that had much less on its mind, “Perfect Blue” tells a DePalma-like story of violent obsession that soon accelerates into the stuff of a full-on psychic collapse (or two). It begins with a J-pop idol quitting her music group to become a full-time actress on a trashy TV procedural called “Double Bind,” a decision that doesn’t appear to sit well with the ogre-like superfan who may or may not be responsible for the murders of Mima’s new colleagues.

But Kon is clearly less interested in the (gruesome) slasher angle than in how the killings resemble the crimes on Mima’s show, amplifying a hall of mirrors effect that wedges the starlet further away from herself with every subsequent trauma — real or imagined — until the imagined comes to assume a reality all its own. The indelible finale, in which Mima is chased across Tokyo by a terminally online projection of who someone else thinks the fallen idol should be, offers a searing illustration of a future in which self-identity would become its own kind of public bloodsport (even in the absence of fame and folies à deux). “Perfect Blue” may have been way ahead of its time, but every ing day makes it clearer that Kon’s film was the real thing.