It’s exceedingly worthy of praise and study and not simply for the mind-expanding mental gymnastics required to stay up with the various scenarios and narrative slivers
Auteur-driven animation is pretty rare and Satoshi Kon has a narrative and visual style as unique as (but surely very different) Hayao Miyazaki—surrealism, reflexivity, narrative ambition and dexterity
A film about unrequited love- tragic– and really dueling pursuits– Chiyoko Fujiwara’s relentless pursuit of the man she loves—and the fandom and pursuit of her from the former co-worker and fan/documentary filmmaker
Kon is a master of storytelling structure—not different from Kurosawa, Lynch, Nolan—the film reminds me of Usual Suspects with the collage style, and a little of 1992’s Sally Potter film Orlando but it’s very much its own unique work of art— others you can compare it to are Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (the same year)- specifically with the key, Griffith’s Intolerance, Bunuel’s surrealistic work (including Belle de Jour) – and The Matrix (or Cloud Atlas) from the Wachowski— there’s incredible ambition in that structure as you can see from the auteurs and films being compared to here
The montage of the various limbs of the film collapsing together at the end is like the culmination of Usual Suspects
The various films that Chiyoko Fujiwara was in serves as a storytelling flashback structure (many look like Kurosawa films like Throne of Blood) though they include characters (with some weak comic relief attempts) from the modern timeline
Satoshi Kon’s obsession with manipulating time and reality
I’d like to see a David Bordwell form study of the structure
The various films that Chiyoko Fujiwara was in
Jeff Shannon – Seattle Times “Given its complex array of fact, fiction, location, character and atmosphere, Millennium Actress is almost unimaginable in any other medium.”
Scott Von Doviak – Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com – “Lack of ambition is not one of the movie’s problems.”
I rarely say this but I think the film could use another 20 minutes (it’s 87) to let some of the threads breathe a little. It’s incredibly dense- I look forward to a revisit
The mise-en-scene is beautiful but the editing may be the greatest stylistic feature of the film beyond the narrative mastery—not only is the film weaved together in an inventive way, the transitions are truly brilliant- the graphic matches are aplenty including one particularly beautiful one of a long highway transitioning into a hallway in a hospital
[…] Millennium Actress – Kon […]