Why Mil­len­ni­um Actress remains one of cinema’s great­est love letters

Of the numer­ous indeli­ble works Satoshi Kon made through­out his career, Mil­len­ni­um Actress might be the only one that looks to our past. Fol­low­ing his 1997 debut fea­ture Per­fect Blue, the Japan­ese ani­ma­tor and man­ga cre­ator began to make pre­dic­tions about the chang­ing rela­tion­ship between peo­ple and media in the fledg­ling dig­i­tal age – his third film, Tokyo God­fa­thers, looked at those who fell through the cracks in con­tem­po­rary Tokyo, and this theme car­ried through to his TV series Para­noia Agent and final film Papri­ka, too.

Mil­len­ni­um Actress was Kon’s fol­low up to Per­fect Blue. Just as both films lie on oppo­site sides of the line between the 20^th and 21^st cen­turies, their con­struc­tion and themes mir­ror one anoth­er. While Per­fect Blue is more empa­thet­ic than cyn­i­cal, it reflects the grim poten­tial of the inter­net in its sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror. Though tinged with melan­choly and tragedy, Mil­len­ni­um Actress uses cin­e­ma his­to­ry to turn the real­i­ty-bend­ing dra­ma of Per­fect Blue into some­thing more gen­tle and roman­tic, find­ing the beau­ty in that thin divide between media and the self, rather than encroach­ing horror.

The set-up is sim­ple enough: a doc­u­men­tar­i­an named Genya Tachibana is look­ing to inter­view the reclu­sive actress Chiyoko (who appears as an amal­ga­ma­tion of Set­suko Hara and Hidea­ki Takem­ine), the for­mer star of a stu­dio whose orig­i­nal lot is being demol­ished at the film’s open­ing. Once they begin the inter­view, the film leaps back in time to Chiyoko’s child­hood, telling of the begin­ning of her act­ing career and her search for an illu­sive man whom she shel­tered from the government.

It would be a fair­ly straight­for­ward premise if not for the fact that in the recount­ing of her sto­ry, Genya and his cam­era­man appear con­spic­u­ous­ly with­in Chiyoko’s mem­o­ries as if they were there, film­ing and inter­fer­ing. Fur­ther­more, as they wit­ness the begin­ning of her act­ing career the line between Chiyoko’s per­for­mances and her real life blurs until it’s hard to tell which is which.

Kon and co-writer Sadaya­ki Murai con­vey the emo­tion­al real­i­ty of her life through a restag­ing of 20^th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese cin­e­ma. The crew fol­lows Chiyoko across dif­fer­ent time peri­ods (and gen­res) in scenes ref­er­enc­ing Goji­ra and Zato­ichi, a set that com­bines Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Shake­speare­an epics Ran and Throne of Blood, and a con­fronta­tion between Chiyoko and her moth­er which echos Yasu­jirō Ozu’s Tokyo Sto­ry. Each new homage cor­re­sponds to a rela­tion­ship in the real world.

Among its gor­geous and ever-chang­ing back­ground art, Takeshi Honda’s sub­tle and real­is­tic char­ac­ter design helps to ground the fan­tas­ti­cal plot, while Susumu Hirasawa’s boun­cy elec­tron­ic score reminds us that we are always stand­ing out­side of the var­i­ous time peri­ods which the char­ac­ters jump between. (As for this new release, All The Animé’s restora­tion is pris­tine; the colours pop and the draw­ings are sharp­er than ever, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the orig­i­nal texture.)

Cin­e­ma act­ing as a love let­ter to itself is hard­ly a nov­el idea, but out­side of Kon’s own fil­mog­ra­phy there is noth­ing quite like Mil­len­ni­um Actress. The direc­tor mas­ter­ful­ly uses the mal­leabil­i­ty of ani­ma­tion to find new beau­ty in even the most well-trod­den ground. Kon paints film as almost spir­i­tu­al in the way it pro­longs life, and although the for­mat itself is also per­ish­able, Chiyoko’s life and mem­o­ry stretch from one mil­len­ni­um to the next.

Mil­len­ni­um Actress is avail­able now via All The Ani­mé.