Millennium Actress

I must be getting soft since my favorite movies this year have been love stories: Show Me Love, Mansfield Park and now Millennium Actress directed by Satoshi Kon.

Quick thoughts on the movie

I had enjoyed his previous film Perfect Blue with it’s clever story about celebrity and obsession but it lapsed into silly thriller cliches far too often. It was sort of Se7en meets Being John Malkovich inside Internet chat rooms. Then nothing from him for five or six years till Millennium Actress. Again he is tackling the simulacrum of celebrity and the physical world to say it’s all part of the same story of human endeavor. Film it or live it but the story that lives on after you is even bigger. Like the cult classic “The Stunt Man” this movie is full of trap-doors between the movie within a movie and the reality within a movie. The film deftly weaves between Chiyoko’s movie roles, her real past and her present to tell a great story about her search for one love. Along the way you get a sort of Cliff’s Notes of Japanese history, lovingly animated as apparently only the Japanese and Pixar still remember how to do.

It has an emotional heft to it that I had been missing from animated films since the Iron Giant said “Superman.” Listening: Crank Heart - Xiu Xiu