Paprika
Even man-child Fritz Haber deserves love.
After a man-child scientist invents a dream machine, there is a “break in” and some of those Weapons of Mass Delusion disappear. The project leader is grilled by the director who is ideologically opposed to technology in general and she is tasked with recovering them.
With the help of a depressed cop, they blow the lid on the inside job. The director is the mastermind behind the whole thing. Since he is wheelchair bound, it is necessary to rope in a coworker with a crush on her, which makes him an hypocritical sociopath by trying to kill her.
After the brutal putdowns the man-child gets from Chiba, it’s touching to see them together by the end. Beneath the professional woman shell there was a spicy Paprika waiting to get a chance to shine.
The dream sequences are incredible, punctuated with references to other films, like Bond, Tarzan and others I don’t recognise.
PS: Yes, I believe Inception took many ideas from this (but not the lack of explosions, unfortunately). This is not a bad thing, per se.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.