Kon. Satoshi Kon made just a total of four films before passing away at a very young 46 years of age. All four films land in the archives. I saw Millennium Actress after doing my top 100 of the decade so it misses the metric below but will most likely be on it when I update that list. Kon is an auteur-driven animator—incredibly rare. Only Hayao Miyazaki has the clearly superior filmography and resume in that mode. Rarer still in animation is the level of ambition involved in Kon’s films. Admirable. Few auteurs—Herzog, Coppola Tarkvosky and a handful of others sought to make the best film of all-time virtually every time they made a film and it appears clear that Kon tried to do that in at least three of the four films he made(aside from Tokyo Godfathers).
Best film: Millennium Actress
- 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
- 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
- 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
- I’d like to see a David Bordwell form study of the structure
- 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
total archiveable films: 4
top 100 films: 0
top 500 films: 0
top 100 films of the decade: 0
most overrated: There’s nothing overrated for Satoshi Kon. It looks like he has yet to be discovered by most critics- Paprika is #32 of 2006 on the 21st century list of the TSPDT consensus. That’s the only one mentioned from Satoshi Kon on the top 2000 or the 21st century list top 1000 list.
most underrated : Millennium Actress. They’re all underrated—but Millennium Actress isn’t one of the 71 films mentioned from 2004 on the TSPDT 21st century list somehow. Ugh.
gem I want to spotlight : Perfect Blue. After seeing each film only once (not enough) I think it is superior to Paprika. It’s more contained—perhaps not as ambitions but lands way more of the punches it throws it that makes sense.
stylistic innovations/traits:
- Thoughtful meditations on reality, celebrity- surrealism often bending time
- Layered/splintering narrative structures
- Clearly an influence on some of the 21st centuries best filmmakers from Nolan (Paprika) to Aronofsky
- Auteur-driven animation is pretty rare and Satoshi Kon has a narrative and visual style as unique as (but surely very different) Hayao Miyazaki—reflexivity, narrative ambition and dexterity
- Kon is a master of storytelling structure—not different from Kurosawa, Lynch, Nolan—Millenium 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
- Thoughtful transitions in the editing—really he was a master editor on two levels, the scene to scene transitions and in-scene edits along with the story splicing structural editing
top 10
- Millennium Actress
- Perfect Blue
- Paprika
- Tokyo Godfathers
By year and grades
| 1997- Perfect Blue | HR |
| 2001- Millennium Actress | HR/MS |
| 2003- Tokyo Godfathers | R |
| 2006- Paprika | R |
*MP is Masterpiece- top 1-3 quality of the year film
MS is Must-see- top 5-6 quality of the year film
HR is Highly Recommend- top 10 quality of the year film
R is Recommend- outside the top 10 of the year quality film but still in the archives
takahata? grave of the fireflies one of my favorites and all time anti war films (ebert agrees).
@ m http://thecinemaarchives.com/2018/08/14/grave-of-the-fireflies-2018-taktahata/
Very interesting, this is the director who was copied (I think only Paprika) Black Swan bought the rights.
Paprika = Inception
Perfect Blue = Black Swan
Aronofsky actually bought the rights for Perfect Blue to reuse a shot from it in Requiem for a Dream, so still not totally above board, but yeah.
I’ll keep this bookmarked. I’ll be working with Kon’s films soon (I would already be doing so if I hadn’t been derailed by Covid) and will address this later, but we have small to massive differences of opinion on 3 of his 4 films. And I intend to address them when the time comes.
@Matt Harris— that sounds like a threat. haha. Go for it.
Oh it’s (K)on!
@Matt Harris– haha. fair. But whatever fury you throw this way at me I hope you save more for the TSPDT consensus. He’s the invisible man on that website. I may be (along with Nolan and Aronofsky) your closest cinephile ally on Kon