Millennium Actress DVD
Millennium Actress 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. The narrative style is complex and interwoven in the style of “play within a play”.
Millennium Actress depicts a director, Genya Tachibana, who is working on a documentary about a famous actress, Chiyoko Fujiwara. In her old age, Chiyoko has withdrawn from public life, but Tachibana slowly draws her out. As he talks to her, the story of her life, from teenage schoolgirl to middle-aged superstar, gradually unfolds, illustrated through flashbacks interspersed with segments from her films. Her 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.
As a child in the 1930s, at the time of the fascist government, Chiyoko helps a dissident artist escape from the military. She becomes attracted to him; however, the next day he is forced to flee again. She finds that he has left behind a key to his suitcase of art supplies and she becomes an actress to travel to different lands in the hopes of finding him and returning the key. Although she never finds her lost love, she insists on continuing the search. At the end of the film, it is revealed that Chiyoko’s love was caught and tortured to death by the military. Tachibana knew this, but was unable to tell Chiyoko. As Chiyoko finishes her story, there is an earthquake and she is injured. Tachibana takes her to the hospital, where she reveals that she suspected the possibility that her love was dead. It is implied that she dies at the end of the movie, continuing her quest to find him in the next life.
However, this story is complicated by the fact that most of the stories from Chiyoko’s life are illustrated with a scene from one of her films, rather than a true flashback, so that it is difficult to distinguish reality from fiction. In addition, Tachibana and his cameraman appear in films, and actually participate in their events in various guises. Tachibana always casts himself in her memories as her self-sacrificing protector, a role he played in real life during an accident on the set that nearly killed her.
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