Trying to get someone who’s not an anime fan interested in attending this weekend’s Japanese animation retrospective at Lincoln Center, “Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination,” is probably a losing proposition. You can point out that Mr. Kon has won international acclaim for his direction of animated films and television series, but to most Americans, Japanese anime is a suspicious medium of miniskirted schoolgirls with enormous breasts, giant robots shaped like miniskirted schoolgirls with enormous breasts, and space aliens that take the form of miniskirted schoolgirls with enormous breasts. Most right-thinking people consider it psychological baby food for feeble-minded perverts who have a hard time making friends.

The good news for your suspicious friend is that this is basically the same view of anime that Mr. Kon has. In fact, it’s the view he has of the entire entertainment industry, which he’ll likely be happy to tell you in his onstage conversation with Film Society program director Richard Peña on Friday. The program will also include all four of Mr. Kon’s feature films, as well as the animator’s cult-favorite television series “Paranoia Agent.”

But the director is no gleeful prankster, à la Takashi Murakami, whose superflat manifesto (the artist’s aesthetic, influenced by anime, meant to disparage the emptiness of Japanese consumer culture) and mondo porno sculptures of anime boys and babes spraying copious bodily fluids are poisoned pies in the face of the anime aesthetic. Mr. Kon is a subverter, not a saboteur, and it’s no coincidence that after watching his directorial debut from 1998, “Perfect Blue,” no less an authority than B-movie king Roger Corman compared him to Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock was an exquisite motion picture craftsman who, like Mr. Kon, was wary of his own medium. He channeled his suspicion about heroic behavior stemming from self-serving motives into Jimmy Stewart’s kinky character in “Vertigo,” and his belief that moviegoing was inherently sadistic provided the meaty subtext for “Rear Window.” Mr. Kon embodies the same ambivalence, despising anime for its laziness and its substitution of safe yet empty spectacle for authentic but messy experience. In an early interview, he slipped a dagger in the ribs of anime artists when he dismissed their obsession with beautiful little girls and giant robots as “a little sad.” The movie he had just made, “Perfect Blue,” was more than a little sad. It was downright devastating.

Although it was originally a work-for-hire job to adapt novelist Yoshikazu Takeuchi’s “Perfect Blue” into an animated film, Mr. Kon reduced the book to a three-word mandate — “idol,” “horror,” “fan” — and turned it into a film that was one part Dario Argento thriller, one part Bergman-esque fragmenting of female identity, and one part demoralizing wallow in the tatty world of B-list pop stars. Mima, a pop idol in the minor-league girl group Cham, leaves the tutus and bubblegum behind to become a serious actress. But she is so naïve and artless that her manager has to explain to her what the Internet is, and she is soon coerced into a “mature” photo shoot. Then she begs her way onto a TV drama, only to discover that her big scene is a rape in a strip club. On top of that, an online stalker is impersonating her, and her old virginal pop star identity assumes a murderous life of its own.

At the time, Mr. Kon couldn’t command top-tier financing, so the film is full of low-budget anime convention. The camera pans over static drawings to give them a false sense of movement; character designs lean toward caricature, and the voice-acting is cookie-cutter at best. But married to the director’s dark material, these conventions create a hall-of-mirrors effect, warping the emotions along with the images. Hence, the climax is not a final spot of violence, but the discovery that Mima’s soul has been eaten by her public persona; when she’s not being reflected in someone else’s eyes, she’s little more than a broken doll.

“Perfect Blue” made Mr. Kon a superstar. His next film, the madly self-referential “Millennium Actress” (2001), projects the history of Japanese film onto the life of a reclusive elderly actress. Technically it’s breathtaking, but what point is there in decrying the corrosive artificiality of pop culture before turning around and giving it a big wet kiss? Next, Mr. Kon adapted John Ford’s 1948 Western “3 Godfathers” into “Tokyo Godfathers.” But the result was what one would expect from a movie about wacky transvestites, the noble homeless, and missing babies: saccharine melodrama.

Mr. Kon’s next project, however, remains his most accomplished to date, despite the success last year of the feature film “Paprika,” which enjoyed a theatrical run in New York and made about $1 million worldwide. “Paranoia Agent,” a 13-episode TV series, stands next to David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” and Lars Von Trier’s “The Kingdom” as one of the most sustained and ambitious artistic visions ever broadcast on television. A repository for story ideas trapped in Mr. Kon’s head after five laborious years of feature filmmaking, “Paranoia Agent” is set in a modern-day Tokyo that’s observed with the cool detachment of a J.G. Ballard novel. The story centers on a series of street attacks by a young boy who wears in-line skates and wields a golden baseball bat, earning the media moniker “Shonen Bat.”

Shonen Bat’s first victim is the creator of a Hello Kitty-esque icon known as Maromi, and the two detectives brought in to investigate are shocked to find that she’s relieved by her attack: Hospitalization has freed her from the pressure to expand Maromi’s success. As the series progresses, Shonen Bat’s attacks spread like a virus from one victim to another until, suddenly, he’s arrested. Like revealing who killed Laura Palmer, you’d think this would end the show, but Mr. Kon is just getting down to business. Have the police arrested a copycat? Was there ever an attacker in the first place? As Shonen Bat morphs from person to meme, to rumor, to urban legend, and finally to a curse spreading across Tokyo, Mr. Kon dissects the way we spend so much of our lives obsessed with flat, two-dimensional images of celebrities and cartoons in order to numb ourselves to the vastness of the infinitely interconnected world in which we live.

Mr. Kon claims to be bored by so many things: the limits of animation, traditional film editing, pop culture. Yet that’s his medium, and so each of his creations carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. It’s fitting that the finale of “Paranoia Agent” isn’t a climactic disclosure of a giant robot or a magical schoolgirl or anything quite so mundane. Instead, it’s a scene of a normal, summer afternoon and a middle-aged man in a rumpled security guard uniform working at a construction site. Drawn with such attention to detail that it practically glows, it’s a rejection of anime’s traditional subject matter and a celebration of everything that people watch anime to escape, namely daily life, the workaday grind, and humdrum reality. As the credits roll, one can imagine Mr. Kon, detonator in hand, pushing the button to destroy his own art form, because that’s the only way he thinks it can truly be free.

Through Tuesday (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).