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Millennium Actress Movie Review

Millennium Actress is a 2001 anime drama film directed by Satoshi Kon. It’s a typically strange, convoluted movie from this director.

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“The part I really loved was chasing him“

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A TV interviewer and his cameraman meet a former actress and travel through her memories and career. The main issue with this film is its incoherent structure that made it difficult to understand what’s going on at any moment. Many critics have praised the film for blurring the line between fiction and reality, but I am personally not a fan of this surreal, strange storytelling style that I always find just odd for the sake of being odd.

Honoring the likes of classic Japanese actresses such as Setsuko Hara was a wonderful idea, but the problem here was that the characterization was insufficiently bad for a movie that is in reality trying to be a character study, but failing miserably at that. It’s a case of style over substance that forsakes any meaningful storytelling, emotions or character development in the process.

Chiyoko for all the screen time that she got remained an enigma throughout, which to me was not a good storytelling choice. Others only popped in and out of the picture without getting any meaningful moments to make an impact. The voice acting is at least excellent and quite emotive.

The only valid reason to see Millennium Actress is for that stunning animation. This was the last hand-drawn film for Satoshi Kon, who later turned to CGI for his later efforts. Not only is the palette so colorful, but the movie is meticulously detailed in costuming, sets and memorable imagery throughout. It honored Japanese cinema history with a lot of style and artistry. At times the movie even felt like a painting come to life, which is why I ended up at least respecting it if not caring for it personally.

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There was a more interesting movie here as some of the dialogue is exceptional and some scenery is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Had Kon approached the film with less frantic and messy editing and more coherent storytelling, it would have been something special, a great homage to cinema and art, but this way it was more frustrating than enjoyable, not to mention repetitive as how many times did we have to see the protagonist running frantically in this movie.