Millennium Actress

Fabulous for many reasons. Most important, this movie is Chiyoko's story, not an anime adventure. It's animated, but it's human and will touch the soul of anyone who has loved deeply.

To watch Millennium Actress is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.

Although we never feel any true connection to the enigmatic actress, there's no denying the inventiveness of Kon's homage to the possibilities of cinema.

The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional.

Past and present, reality and fiction blend seamlessly into each other in Satoshi Kon's dream-like animated drama.

Millennium Actress is a quest for beauty and truth that is as wonderful to look at as it is gruelling to contemplate.

Flashbacks integrate with scenes from her films, and it becomes difficult to discern between the two -- cinema is equated with memory. Unfortunately, the trippy disorientation ultimately devolves into outright confusion.

Satoshi Kon's style of his story makes is time to get it magnificent but Millennium Actress is wonderful for one actress about her career and memories of fantasies.

Ever wondered why does a well-told love story always work in every movie regardless of its genre? Be it a shoot-'em-up actioner, a swashbuckling fantasy, an alien-invasion sci-fi or a cowboy western, nothing can prove a constraint to the power of love in cinema. For love thrives in cinema. It has the ability to ground the most wild and fanciful stories in reality because it evokes emotion in such a way the viewer comes to identify with the characters and invest in the story readily. Satoshi Kon captures that notion here to perfection, blurring the logical line between reality and fiction, forcing us to completely rely on what we feel as we're letting the movie wash over us. "The Key" is a catalyst that opened the flood-gates of memories of the eponymous actress, letting these memories rush out in flashback scenes the two documentarians interviewing Chiyoko are literally pulled into them. The cheekily innovative way of making them intervene in her quasi-fictional stories added a sense of meta and light relief that imbued the film with much needed breeziness. In addition, that made us pry to Chiyoko's both inner and outer feelings throughout her cinematic and love-pursuing journey. That said, Millennium Actress perhaps runs too short to make a lasting impact on me, and the frenetic pace doesn't help either. I'm sure, however, that a rewatch can make me pump my rating up. "I can't remember! Not even his face! I loved him so much. Now I can't remember his face!" The story moulds the agonizing feelings of longing in memory vessels that would preserve love so long as youthfulness lasts. But youthfulness withers, allowing memories to fade away. Here comes the struggle that's even harder than the life-time seeking of love: the struggle of desperately trying to hold onto memories of lost love while your aging mind failing you. That's when you even fail to lament your most precious loss! The story here takes a huge metaphysical leap to emphasize the immortality of love and cinema.

This is an intriguing anime film. Its not so much a film aimed at young kids and I liked the plot concept of travelling through different times in a persons life, to see what they saw and witness events first hand. I thought the old fashioned, video game type music played at times was somehow endearing - it has quite a strong sense of nostalgia. It's not as great as Tokyo Godfathers (it features the same director) but its certainly worth a watch regardless if your into anime films and so I would recommend it, yes.

Satoshi Kon's follow-up to Perfect Blue is a somewhat lighter, less engrossing picture. We tail a pair of DIY documentarians, enamored with their subject, as they suss out the location of a reclusive former starlet and entice her to share her life's story. Truth and fiction intertwine in the telling of that particular saga, with personal memoirs stirred into various scenes from her best-loved screen performances. The result is a flighty, dreamlike atmosphere, a general easing in and out of the present that doesn't always follow a linear train of thought. It operates with a soft touch, which matches the understated nature of our aging narrator; smoothly straddling genres and decades en route to a destined meeting with a lost love. That puts it on common thematic ground with both Perfect Blue and Paprika (Kon's 2006 swan song), which both toyed with perception and the meeting ground between internal and external realities. Millennium Actress, though, approaches the subject with reduced color and vigor, leaving less dangling threads to captivate audiences and fewer cornerstone visual showpieces to linger in their memories.