Millennium Actress

Millennium Actress (千年女優) 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]

Plot

Chiyoko Fujiwara, a renowned former actress and prominent star for film company Ginei, accepts a request for a retrospective interview amidst the demolition of the company's obsolete studio, her first interview in thirty years after her sudden retirement from the entertainment industry. Documentarian Genya Tachibana, a fan of Chiyoko, visits her house with his cameraman Kyoji Ida. Genya gives Chiyoko a small box containing an old-fashioned key. She remarks that the key "opens the most important thing" and begins reflecting on her life.

Chiyoko was born during the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which took the life of her father. As a schoolgirl, she is scouted by Ginei's general manager to appear in a government-sponsored film to inspire troops serving in the Second Sino-Japanese War. While her mother opposes, intending for Chiyoko to inherit the family's

Production

Millennium Actress is the second film directed by Satoshi Kon and his first original work, after the highly acclaimed Perfect Blue.[5][6] It was planned by Masao Maruyama and produced by Taro Maki.[7] The film is partly based on the life of Japanese actress Setsuko Hara.[4]

Following the release of Perfect Blue, Kon considered adapting the Yasutaka Tsutsui novel Paprika (1993) into his next film. However, these plans were stalled when the distribution company for Perfect Blue, Rex Entertainment, went bankrupt.[8]

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]

Unlike the previous film, which he was hired to direct, this one was his original project, so he was able to express his own opinions, and decided to put more emphasis on the sound, especially the music, and asked Susumu Hirasawa, who had been adored for a long time, to compose the music.[11] There were about 250 staff members in total, and the production period was about two years. The 20 or so main staff members were almost the same as in the previous work, with only the animation director changing.[10] In the previous work, the character design was done by Hisashi Eguchi and the animation director by Hideki Hamasu, but in this work, both were done by Takeshi Honda.[11] The reason for this is that the animation director is a very important and burdensome position, and the animators who have the skills and abilities that Kon would like to work with are usually those prefer to draw key frames rather than the animation director, making it difficult to ask them to continue their work.[11] For the character designs, Honda was chosen because he is someone who draws elegant pictures that can appeal to those outside of the animation community and is genuinely talented in the animation industry, in order to make sure that the movie would have reach audiences both within and outside the spectrum of animation fandom.[11]

This is Kon's last movie to utilize cel animation, as his later works were produced using digital ink-and-paint among other digital methods. And most of the scenes are drawn based on Kon's layout.[12]

The budget was initially 130 million yen, and the final budget was around 100 million and a few tens of millions of yen, one of the lowest production costs for an animated film in Japan.[13]

Themes

Millennium Actress began with a request to make a trompe l'oeil movie like the previous Perfect Blue. However, it was only a film technique, not a film theme. Both works share the same methodology of "blurring the boundary between fiction and reality," and both works are like two sides of the same coin for Kon.[11][17] The previous film focused on the negative side of human nature, while this film focuses on the positive side.[17] The previous film depicted the gradual blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality, while this film seamlessly connects fiction and reality from the beginning, and shows the characters freely moving back and forth between fiction and reality.[5] The technique of mixing fiction and reality was used to express the protagonist's uneasy inner world in the previous film, and used in this film for a fun adventure, turning the film from psycho-horror and suspense to a tricky and humorous entertainment.[18][19]

In the previous film, he tried to confuse the audience by depicting the inner turmoil and chaos of the main character through the mixture of fiction and reality, but in this film, his intention is not to confuse the audience, but to let the audience enjoy the mixture of fiction and reality itself.[11] He aimed to create a film a kind of The Adventures of Old Lady Blowing Smoke by mixing fiction and reality to the point where it becomes meaningless to distinguish between them.[11]

There are various kinds of trompe l'oeil paintings, but one example that Kon gave to the staff was Utagawa Kuniyoshi's ukiyoe "At first glance he looks very fierce, but he is actually a kind person" (みかけハこハゐがとんだいゝ人だ). At first glance, it appears to be the face of a single person, but upon closer inspection, one can see that many people are intertwined, and he likened this characteristic of the painting, "non-faces coming together to form a face," to the concept of this work, "lies piling up to reveal the truth.[5]

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]

Kon said, "There is no single solution - that's what I want most for my work to be. I want people to see it in many different ways."[19]

director	Satoshi Kon
producer	Taro Maki
screenplay	Sadayuki Murai Satoshi Kon
story	Satoshi Kon
starring	Miyoko Shōji Mami Koyama Fumiko Orikasa Shōzō Iizuka Shōko Tsuda Hirotaka Suzuoki Hisako Kyōda Kōichi Yamadera Masane Tsukayama
music	Susumu Hirasawa
cinematography	Hisao Shirai
editing	Satoshi Terauchi
studio	Madhouse
distributor	The KlockWorx
runtime	87 minutes
language	Japanese
country	Japan
budget	$1.2 million‡R1R‡
gross	$37,641 (US)‡R2R‡

Plot

Cast

Production

Release

Box office

Themes

Critical reception

Awards

Further reading

External links

References