[Ok, ok... wait, what?]
Perfect Blue is the kind of story that begins innocently enough by making sense and slowly makes less sense as time passes by. The only thing I know for sure that happens in Perfect Blue is that the main character is a singer that decides to go be an actress like the synopsis says. Everything that happens afterward is up for debate whether it is real or not. I assume things happen afterward, but I can not tell you definitively if things actually happen afterward.
Perfect Blue is abstract in a similar fashion as something like Fight Club or Serial Experiments Lain. However, in something like Fight Club, only the psyche of the main character gets brought into question, not the psyche of the narrative itself. Where Fight Club has an identity crisis, I would say that Perfect Blue has an existential crisis. Imagine something like Inception but done well. Inception fails in that the narrative makes sense whether anything real or it is all a dream. The questioning of reality becomes trivial in this scenario. Perfect Blue does this concept correctly because nothing makes sense. Whether any event in Perfect Blue is real or not is significant because it impacts the narrative: what you perceive Perfect Blue is trying to tell you.
[But in the end...|
It doesn't matter if anything in Perfect Blue is real or not. The only thing that matters is what the audience takes away from the narrative.
We can debate all day about what actually happens in Perfect Blue, but at the end of the day, that is not what Perfect Blue is asking of the audience. Perfect Blue is not a puzzle. Perfect Blue is not meant to be deciphered. The idea of distinguishing the real from the abstract IS in itself, the point of Perfect Blue.
[Let's bring it back]
This review is starting to get too abstract now, let's come back to reality.
Perfect Blue is a master course in abstract storytelling. However, due to how abstract Perfect Blue is, I can not bring myself to give it a higher score. When you have such an abstract narrative, how is the audience supposed to come to any meaningful conclusion or themes? Perfect Blue is abstract enough to be really good, but too abstract to be brilliant.
I think the most abstract you can get while still being great themes-wise is something like Serial Experiments Lain. You need to use your abstract narrative to convey complex ideas, not just for the sake of being abstract.
[Ending thoughts]
Though I did not give Perfect Blue the highest score, I highly recommend it as a study on abstract storytelling. If you want to see a story slowly descend into madness, Perfect Blue is the anime for you.
