This scene may be the height of the movie’s delirium, and it’s as good a place to enter the bizarre world of Paprika as any. It illustrates the permeability of this hallucinatory world, where with a little effort characters can travel into and between each others’ dreams, and between dreams and reality. It highlights the film’s transformed, dreamlike sexuality, where penetration is always symbolic and unerotic. And it shows off artist/director Satoshi Kon’s deranged (but not quite perverted) imagination, alongside his peerless technical mastery. There’s an incredible fluidity to the animation as we watch the detective’s half-visible body slowly appear as he strains to burst through the suddenly elastic wall, bending the butterfly cases until they burst. Paprika is full of such warping techniques, like the rippling carpet that piles up in waves behind a dreamer as he tries to run; the visuals are almost three-dimensional at times, and although they’re technically flat they are in reality far more impressive that the object-flying-at-my-eyeball gimmicks that dominate modern 3-D spectaculars.