Millenium Actress

[oscar jubis]

MILLENIUM ACTRESS (Sennen Joyu) is the new anime from director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue). Genya, a mature documentarian, and his young cameraman manage to track down Chiyoko, an iconic actress who's led a reclusive life for thirty years. She consents to an interview. Life events and scenes from her movies come to life in free-form fashion. Genya, who met Chiyoko as an apprentice at the old studio, interpolates himself into the scenes from Chiyoko's movies, which run the gamut from historical epic to weepie to SciFi. MILLENIUM ACTRESS flouts the usual distinctions between movies and the reality they counterfeit. It's a highly original work with animation that manages to capture the different styles and genres of the golden age of Japanese Cinema.
The crucial event in Chiyoko's life is her intense but brief meeting with a dissident artist being pursued by the emperor's thought police circa 1940. A meeting that will resonate for the rest of her life.
MILLENIUM ACTRESS manages to be effective as obsessional love story, homage to Japanese film traditions, biography, and a fan's love letter to his favorite actress.
The film opened last September in NY, LA, Frisco, Chicago, Boston and Toronto. The Asian dvd selling on ebay is compatible with North American dvd players, and affordable. MILLENIUM ACTRESS deserves at least a rental. A regional dvd release is expected next year.

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by oscar jubis
MILLENIUM ACTRESS (Sennen Joyu) is the new anime from director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue). Genya, a mature documentarian, and his young cameraman manage to track down Chiyoko, an iconic actress who's led a reclusive life for thirty years. She consents to an interview. Life events and scenes from her movies come to life in free-form fashion. Genya, who met Chiyoko as an apprentice at the old studio, interpolates himself into the scenes from Chiyoko's movies, which run the gamut from historical epic to weepie to SciFi. MILLENIUM ACTRESS flouts the usual distinctions between movies and the reality they counterfeit. It's a highly original work with animation that manages to capture the different styles and genres of the golden age of Japanese Cinema.
The crucial event in Chiyoko's life is her intense but brief meeting with a dissident artist being pursued by the emperor's thought police circa 1940. A meeting that will resonate for the rest of her life.
MILLENIUM ACTRESS manages to be effective as obsessional love story, homage to Japanese film traditions, biography, and a fan's love letter to his favorite actress.
The film opened last September in NY, LA, Frisco, Chicago, Boston and Toronto. The Asian dvd selling on ebay is compatible with North American dvd players, and affordable. MILLENIUM ACTRESS deserves at least a rental. A regional dvd release is expected next year. I loved this film as well. here is a recent review:
MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (Sennen joyu)

Directed by SatoshiKon (2001)

In some films, the dividing line between subjective and objective reality is very tenuous. In Satoshi Kon's poetic Japanese animé film Millennium Actress, it is almost non-existent. When the Ginei studio is about to be razed, filmmaker Genya Tachibana decides to make a documentary about the studio and its greatest star, legendary actress Fujiwara Chiyoko, who disappeared from public life more than thirty years ago. After finding an old key that belonged to the aging actress, he travels to her secluded mountain retreat with his assistant Kyogi Ida to interview her for the documentary. When Genya gives her the key, it unlocks a stream of memories that transports us (along with the cameraman and interviewer) to a different reality that allows us to relive one thousand years of Japanese history using the medium of cinema.

As she tells her story, Chiyoko recounts her birth at the time of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 and how she was discovered as a child actress despite her mother's objection that she was too timid. She reveals how a strange young painter, a political outcast whose name she never discovered, gave her a key and then disappeared, telling her that the key is "the most important thing there is." Chiyoko's dream of reuniting with her lover keeps her alive and becomes what her life is about.

Unfolding more as emotion and mood than narrative, the story takes us on a surreal journey through a series of films within films in which Chiyoko attempts to find her lost love -- playing a princess, a ninja, a geisha, and even an astronaut. In the process, we witness a seamless tableau of Japan's history: the medieval period in the 15th and 16th centuries, the era when the Shogunate was in power, the Meiji period when the Emperor was restored, the Showa period before World War II, and the post-war occupation and recovery.

The line between the events of Chiyoko's real life and scenes from her films is blurred, and the film is difficult to follow on first viewing. To complicate matters even further, the interviewer, Genya, is cast in many roles in which he becomes almost a comic figure as Chiyoko's rescuer. Though the movie is often puzzling, the search to recapture the defining moment in Chiyoko's life strikes a universal chord, and we identify with her desperate quest. Though I found the ending somewhat unsatisfying, Millennium Actress is a complex and beautiful film, and Susumu Hirasawa's hypnotic musical score adds to the blend of warmth, emotional power, and magical realism. Kon sees life as a big romantic movie full of melodrama, humor, and longing, and seems to be saying that while there is often confusion between who we really are and the shifting roles we play in life, what remains constant is our longing for love.

GRADE: A-

[oscar jubis]

I'm glad that at least one other member saw it. Millennium Actress had a "release" limited to 6 screens. I am convinced it would've been a hit if marketed and distributed like Triplets of Belleville, an inferior, less resonant animation feature.
Once I accepted that Genya and Kyogi would be inserted into scenes from Chiyoko's life and films, I found it easy to follow. A wonderful movie for film buffs. Rent the dvd. If you like it, ask me about a Korean anime gem called My Beautiful Girl Mari.

[trevor826]

I've only just caught this on a very good dvd from Manga Entertainment, my view which doesn't go as indepth as Howard's was as follows:

Sennen joyu (2001) Millennium Actress

Directed by Satoshi Kon

Wonderful anime covering 100 years of Japanese cinema and a 1,000 year period of Japanese history and future as well as uncovering the driving force behind the life of an invented actress “Chiyoko Fujiwara”.

Love, unfulfilled love in particular can make or break someone, a minor accident involving Chiyoko and a stranger during her youth set events rolling that will affect the whole of her future. Her whole life is spent trying to find this mystery man who came into and out of her life so abruptly leaving a key in her care which he claims is very important.

We follow Chiyoko through her film career and life as she determines to find this stranger with whom she has become obsessed, along with her life, we follow the paths of those that criss-cross it. Anyone who has read “Memoirs of a Geisha” will recognise the character of the overbearingly jealous older actress who realises the spotlight has passed from her onto “the new model”. Even the documentary maker who is interviewing Chiyoko in her old age has his part in her past as he worked behind the scenes on several of her films and is aware of things that could have changed her life had she known about them.

This is an excellent anime and very different from Satoshi Kon’s other work, it covers several big subjects with broad strokes but pulls us in with its intimate look at life, love and the little things that can mean so much.

The only thing I'm not happy with is the glorification of Japan's imperialistic (early 20th Century) past, still the British or Americans are hardly in any position to comment on this!

All in all a definite recommendation, an inventive storyline with good rewatch value.

Cheers Trev.

BBFC rated PG