Early career

Kon aspired to be an animator as a young child and made his debut as a manga artist with the short manga Toriko (1984) which earned a runner-up spot in the 10th Annual Tetsuya Chiba Awards held by Young Magazine (Kodansha). Among his many supportive role, he was also an uncredited assistant artist of the masterpiece, Akira.His favorite works were Space Battleship Yamato (1974), Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), Future Boy Conan (1978) and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979),as well as Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu: A Child's Dream.Yasutaka Tsutsui served as an influence on Kon's drawings.

Directing

In 1993, Kon scripted and co-produced the fifth episode of the original video animation JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. In 1997, Kon began work on his directorial debut film Perfect Blue and later followed by another masterpiece, Paprika in which their plan, however was stalled due to the production company going bankrupt. Other works such as Millennium actress and Tokyo Godfathers were also released. It was in 2006 when Paprika was announced, after having been planned out and materialized for over years.

Health deterioration and death

In May 2010, Kon was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Given half a year to live, Kon chose to spend the remainder of his life in his home. Shortly before his death Kon composed a final message, which was uploaded to his blog by his family upon his death. As Kon explained in the message, he chose not to make news of his rapidly advancing illness public, in part out of embarrassment at how drastically emaciated and ravaged his body had become. The result was that the announcement of his death was met with widespread shock and surprise, particularly given that Kon had shown no signs of illness at relatively recent public events, as the cancer progressed to a terminal state in a matter of months after being diagnosed.[27] Kon died on August 24, 2010, at the age of 46.