パプリカ (Paprika)

Widely observed, never acknowledged, and filed LOW for exactly that reason. The parallels are specific: a device that lets one person enter another's dream, a corridor that becomes the wrong way up, a mirror opened as a door between states, and a character falling to wake. Against it: Nolan has said he wrote Inception over roughly ten years and has named architecture, heist films and his own Following as sources, not Kon. Satoshi Kon died in 2010 and made no claim.

The same director developing one idea across a decade, which is worth an edge because the idea is the thing both films are known for. Perfect Blue works out the technique: a cut that lands in a different reality without warning, so the audience loses its footing at the same moment the protagonist does. Paprika does it continuously and at scale, and makes the mechanism literal rather than psychological. The subject carries over too: a woman split between a public persona and a private self, with the persona increasingly able to act on its own. Filed MEDIUM, as one artist's development rather than a debt to somebody else.