Looking over the lists critics have made of films and filmmakers that most impressed them during the past decade, I sorely miss the name of a 46-year-old director only hitting his stride at the time of his death in 2010, Satoshi Kon.

Kon’s four adventurous anime features, “Perfect Blue” (1997), “Millennium Actress” (2001), “Tokyo Godfathers” (2003) and “Paprika” (2006) — each film a further development — established his reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent avant-pop filmmakers. Given his interest in the possibilities of cyberspace and the nature of mass media, Kon’s films have as much in common with the work of David Cronenberg or Olivier Assayas as with that of Hayao Miyazaki.

The protagonist of his first feature, “Perfect Blue,” is a vapid girl-group singer named Mima, who angers her fans when she leaves a successful trio for an acting career. To act, however, is to fall apart. Mima is driven mad by a demonic stalker and a computer-generated doppelgänger, both of which may be projections of her own insecurity.

“Perfect Blue” is a hodgepodge of murders, rapes and car crashes, larded up with abundantly animated blood, sweat and tears. The 1999 New York Times review was headlined, “This Cartoon Didn’t Come From Disney.” Upon its release, it exploded like a cartoon bombshell in the anime world and beyond. (Madonna used clips as a video interlude for the song “What It Feels Like for a Girl” in her 2001 tour.)