Brilliant and touching

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

As most Satoshi Kon films, it is confusing and a bit tedious at the start. But at the very end, it concludes beautifully, where everything falls in place. An elderly woman recalls her life, mixing facts with the stories of her films, accompanied by a fan in an interview, where reminiscing of the past makes them feel young again.

As they interview a reclusive former actress, a television reporter and cameraman are literally transported through her memories in this highly unusual animated drama from Japan. It takes a while to grow accustomed to the unusual narrative approach -- and it is still sometimes hard to follow even one understands what is going on -- but there is a lot like in how the whole movie feels like a stream of consciousness brought to life, with the actresses flipping through memories from the start, middle and twilight years of her career before suddenly vanishing from public life. It is also curious to learn of her reasons for going into show business, which turn out to be more than just fame and fortune, with her career flourishing in ways she could have never anticipated and ultimately could not control. The film was apparently inspired by the life of Setsuko Hara (star of 'Late Spring' and several other Ozu films) who withdrew from acting in her early forties to never appear on film again, but the protagonist here could also be related to Greta Garbo and indeed anyone who has ever chosen to leave life in the public eye behind. It is a fascinating journey too, but one does need to pay sharp attention to follow the time shifts.

Satoshi Kon's films tend to have ambitious narrative structures. This one, "Millennium Actress", is no different. It revolves around Genya Tachibana, a documentary director who tracks down Chiyoko Fujiwara, a Japanese movie star he's long admired from afar. He finds her living in the countryside, now a recluse, having retired from acting some 30 years ago.Much of the film watches as Chiyoko recounts her life's story for Tachibana. Her many accomplishments and achievements are then tied to a young man whom she once briefly met and fell in love with. Tachibana, it turns out, spent much of her life attempting to track this man down, not knowing that he died shortly after their first encounter. The film then becomes an elaborate metaphor for a mankind which is doomed to perpetually chase after idealised, objects of desire. The unbridgeable gap between fantasy and reality then becomes the engine which both inspires all human progress, and is responsible for an intrinsic human Lack, an unquenchable discontentment. Achievement, then, is paradoxically tied to an inability to quite achieve. Typifiying the film's psychological complexity, "Millennium Actress" is structured as a grand chase, Chiyoko's reality is repeatedly traumatically interrupted whenever she nears her lover (on a psychological level, humans tend to self-sabotage, or self-destruct the closer they get to Desire), the film is symbolically framed by giant rocket-ships, mankind's capabilities limitless so long as there exists a gap to be bridged, and Tachibana's long-distance love for Chiyoko echoes Chiyoko's own love for the stranger.Whilst the film's first hour may seem disjointed, shapeless and even dull, a powerful ending helps bring things into focus. This ending is almost ruined by an unnecessary line of dialogue, given to Chiyoko, which spells out the film's central theme. It's a heavy-handed and unneeded line. Elsewhere the film uses Chiyoko's life story as a means of trawling through Japan's own political and cinematic history (lots of allusions to famous Japanese films and events).7.9/10 – Worth two viewings.

Not only is this better than any Western animation currently out there, but it's better than most live action movies too. This is the story of a director and cynical cameraman who track down a legendary actress who's been a recluse for the last thirty years. As she tells them her life story, fact and fantasy intertwine, and they become sucked into the world of her reminiscences. In this beautifully animated film the characters truly come alive as real people against awesome backdrops set in the past, present and future. It's flawlessly done. But the real treat is the story. A sophisticated plot line that constantly wrong-foots the audience. It is epic while at the same time intimate, and has an emotional climax that's rarely seen in Western films. Beautiful. 10 out of 10.