Millennium Actress

Millennium Actress

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Millennium Actress (千年女優, Sennen Joyū) is a 2001 Japanese animated drama film co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon and produced by Madhouse. Loosely based on the lives of actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine,[3] it tells the story of two documentary filmmakers investigating the life of a retired acting legend. As she tells them the story of her life, the borderline between cinema and reality gradually becomes blurred.[4]

As Chiyoko begins, the film becomes a surreal story within a story wherein events from Chiyoko's life are interwoven with scenes from films she has appeared in, while Tachibana and Ida appear within them as documentary filmmakers. As a teenager, she was given the key by an artist and political dissident opposing the Sino-Japanese War. She helped him escape from the authorities and after his departure, decided to become a film actress in the hope that he would recognize and find her. Her quest continues for decades and Chiyoko becomes famous, acting in films ranging from jidaigeki to kaiju. Despite not hearing from the mysterious artist, she never loses hope.

Chiyoko loses the key one day during filming and resigns to marrying Junichi Ōtaki, a director at the studio. Years later, Chiyoko finds the key hidden in their home and confronts her husband about it; former lead actress Eiko Shimao reveals that she stole it out of jealousy and gave it to Junichi. One day, the former military policeman who had been pursuing the artist comes to Chiyoko to atone for his sins during the war, and gives her a letter from the artist. He tells Tachibana, who was working as a studio assistant at the time, that the artist was tortured and killed after his arrest. Though she does not receive this information, Chiyoko abandons her search for the artist, accepting that she is no longer the girl the artist once knew.

The project for Millennium Actress came from the words \"Let's make a movie that looks like a trompe l'oeil\" by Taro Maki, who decided to produce Kon's film because he thought his previous work was amazing.[5][9]The script writing began with a sentence that Kon came up with: \"An old woman who was once touted as a great actress is supposed to be recounting her life story, but her memories get confused and the various roles she played in the past begin to blend into it, creating a tumultuous story.\"[6]The structure of the story was decided at the rough plot stage when Kon fleshed out this sentence, and the last scene remained intact in the finished film.[6]He then worked with the scenario writer, Sadayuki Murai, and the producer to develop the episodes and detailed character settings to be included in the plot.[10]

The film has a complex structure in which the staff members who visit the legendary actress for an interview experience her life story in a fictional world where the actress' past and the movies she appeared in intersect, making the story a mixture of reality and fiction as well as a tribute to various classic movies.[20]The main character is modeled on Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, and the movies that appear in the film include a period piece in the style of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, a film by Yasujiro Ozu, a chanbara (sword fighting) story featuring Kurama Tengu, a monster story that borrows images from Godzilla, and a science fiction story.[19][21]

The story follows the personal story of Chiyoko Fujiwara, an elderly actress, and gradually becomes a muddle of reality, dreams, and movies. Each episode repeats a series of scenes of \"chasing, running, and falling\" in different situations and times. Her life, the sum of all of these, also repeats various setbacks and revivals while continuing to chase after Man with Key, who is almost an illusion.[22]This work is basically a repetition of the same episode, a cyclical story like Boléro in music.[6]Kon said that this idea of a fractal structure owes a lot to the music of Susumu Hirasawa.[22]The story also reflects the hospitalization Kon experienced after his debut as a manga artist, and the frustration and struggle he felt at that time: \"Everything is ruined, but can I still make a comeback\"[22]This film is famous for making many audiences feel betrayed by Chiyoko's last line. Kon said that the process of human growth is a repetition of death and rebirth, in which the values we have accumulated up to that point become unacceptable in a new phase, and even if we rebuild them once they are broken, they become unacceptable again in a new phase, and he involved the audience in the fractal of the film by asking them whether they would be able to get up and continue to \"chase, run, and fall\" even after they \"fell\" at the end of the film.[13][22]

Millennium Actress (千年女優 Sennen Joyū) is a 2001 Japanese anime by director Satoshi Kon and animated by the Studio Madhouse. It tells the story of a documentary filmmaker investigating the life of an elderly actress in which reality and cinema become blurred. It is based on the life of Setsuko Hara.

Chiyoko Fujiwara was a top-star actress, who suddenly quit at the height of her career. Genya Tachibana is a director who is seeking her out in order to produce a documentary on her life. This film serves as a \"play within a play\". Chiyoko's life spans the tumultuous period surrounding World War II, while her characters in movies span a time period from the Sengoku period to a futuristic space age.

Director Genya Tachibana is working on a documentary about a famous actress Chiyoko Fujiwara. Kyoji, Tachibana's cameraman, asks him why they are going to her place, and he replies that Chiyoko withdrew from the public at the height of her career. Before leaving, an earthquake interrupts Tachibana, who is watching one of Chiyoko's movies. Once they arrive at Chiyoko's residence, Tachibana blushes as soon as Chiyoko enters, who is now elderly and frail. Tachibana hands her a key, which shocks her, and replies that she thought she never find it. Then, a minor aftershock interrupts. Chiyoko decides to get started before the next one.

Millennium Actress, one of the best animated features of the new millennium (and likely to remain so, no matter how many more are produced during the next 997 years) has finally come to American theaters although in a release so limited that you will miss it if you blink.

Millennium Actress has superficial similarities: Kons distinctive art style; a mystery set within Japans cinematic industry; and a surrealistic viewpoint from inside the heroines mind. But where Perfect Blue emphasized a nightmarish paranoia to make both the heroine and the audience wonder whether she has become a psychotic killer, Millennium Actress is a more benign look into a retired actress bittersweet memories. If Perfect Blue is comparable to Hitchcock, then Millennium Actress is similar to James Camerons Titanic, as an elderly womans flashback of romantic reminiscences, which are so vivid they draw her audience back into the past with her.

It starts with a sci-fi scene very like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but featuring a female astronaut. This turns out to be from a movie being watched by Genya Tachibana, a middle-aged independent documentary filmmaker. It was the final feature made by Chiyoko Fujiwara, Japans greatest actress from the 1930s until the late 1960s when she abruptly vanished into seclusion. Now, 30 years later, Chiyokos old studio has hired Genya to produce a documentary about her. Genya and his brash young cameraman Kyoji Ida track her down and persuade her to give them a personal interview.

Parents need to know that this Japanese animation is no simplistic Speed Racer adventure but an intricate, surreal plotline that blends the make-believe of filmmaking with the \"real\" life of an actress. Kids may be confused by the multiple levels, shifting time-periods, and the ambiguous, bittersweet ending (which is a tenderly metaphorical death from old age). There is studio-set violence -- war, ninja fighting -- that overlaps with the real deal, but never graphically. The heroine considers killing herself with a knife (in a role). Talk of another character dying under government torture.. Swordfights with dead bodies. Some bloodshed, mostly impressionistic. A dead body (mostly covered) of a feudal hari-kari suicide is shown. Earthquakes cause damage. Be prepared for Japanese language with subtitles, rather than English-dubbed editions.

As a Japanese movie studio demolishes its old soundstages, blustery exec Genya and irreverent young videographer Ida start a documentary on one of their stars, actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who retired at the height of her career. They find the reclusive Chiyoko -- 70, the same age as the studio -- gracious and hospitable. Her memories of growing up against the rising Japanese fascism of the 1930s are so vivid that Genya (who, comically, has a lifelong infatuation with Chiyoko) and Ida find themselves back in flashbacks with her, dutifully videotaping the girl's childhood brief encounter with a handsome, nameless artist running from Japanese authorities. This fugitive gives Chiyoko a gold key to \"the most important thing there is\" and disappears. Discovered by a talent agent, Chiyoko turns film actress to track her mystery man to Manchuria, where a propaganda drama is to shoot. During this, the two-man documentary crew reappears as observers/characters in Chiyoko's films -- historical pageants of thwarted love and romantic yearning, set amidst samurai, ninjas, and 20th-century soldiers. Truth and fiction blend in Chiyoko's life, career, and unending search for her nameless first love.

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A TV crew is granted a rare interview with a reclusive actress, leading them and the viewer through decades of cinema history. As she recounts the story of her life and career, the lines be