Art of Millennium Actress
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Millennium Actress is an animation movie produced by Madhouse. It was co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon in 2001. The anime is loosely based on the lives of actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine and 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 difference between reality and cinema becomes blurred. Following the release of Satoshi Kon's previous film Perfect Blue, Kon considered adapting the Yasutaka Tsutsui novel Paprika into his next film. However, these plans were stalled when the distribution company for Perfect Blue, Rex Entertainment, went bankrupt. Millennium Actress is the first Satoshi Kon film to feature Susumu Hirasawa, whom Kon was a long-time fan of, as composer. When producing the movie, Kon created a unique combination of both his memories and his imagination, striving to make Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue two different interpretations of the same concept; a story told from two different perspectives. His intention was to have the two films as sister films. Some have speculated that both films engage with the feminist concept of the male gaze. In Perfect Blue, the gaze is depicted as a negative, patriarchal one, but in Millennium Actress is projected in a more positive light, allowing Chiyoko to retain her identity untainted. The film also presents various references to Japanese history, including the Edo period and Manchukuo, and gives it a nostalgic aesthetic. It is seen not as a sequence of events unfolding in real time, but rather in a retrospective, lighthearted point of view. This is the last major animated film created with hand-inked cels, as most animated films at the time started to use digital ink-and-paint or computer animation. The pictures on this page are a collection of artworks created for this movie.
THE STORY
Ginei Studios, a prestigious but bankrupt film studio, goes out of business. Television interviewer Genya Tachibana and his cameraman Kyoji Ida prepare for a retrospective interview with Chiyoko Fujiwara, the studio's best known star, who thirty years prior retired from acting and became a recluse. When they meet, Tachibana gives Chiyoko a key he believes she lost at the studio, prompting her to reflect on her life. 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 Otaki, a director at the studio. Years later, Chiyoko finds the key hidden in their home…
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