9 Famous Storylines That Hollywood Stole From Anime
6. Black Swan (Perfect Blue)
The story of Black Swan has been subject to much debate since its release 2010, and for good reason. The film's main character, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a dancer for a prestigious ballet company who slowly starts to question her own sanity as she imagines and sees strange events unfold before her. Wanting to be cast in the lead role of the titular Black Swan play, Sayers begins to lose herself in the role as she attempts to portray the elegant swan queen and the dark black swan in equal measure: eventually becoming paranoid and obsessive over those around her. Regardless of director Darren Aronofsky's repeated claims that the Perfect Blue anime didn't influence the film, the similarities between the two are too obvious to deny that someone involved in the creation of Black Swan hadn't seen it. In the anime, Mima Kirigoe is a successful J-pop artist that decides to pursue a change in career and become an actress. Aware that some of her music fans have become upset over the change, Mima becomes increasingly anxious as websites start to appear claiming to be her. After several of her new colleagues are murdered, Mima begins to question her own sanity and involvement over the crime, going so far as to think she has some form of split personality disorder. Like Black Swan, Perfect Blue is rather ambiguous in how it presents factual information of events in the film, and while it has a definitive ending unlike Black Swan, the unsettling events that Nina experiences in Black Swan are almost identical to those seen in Perfect Blue.
Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.
