Wow! Such a good movie.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The acting in this movie is really good.

In this interesting, very attractively drawn anime from Japan, a TV journalist gets to interview Chiyoko Fujiwara, a once famous actress who mysteriously became a recluse after retiring from acting some 30 years ago. As she is interviewed about her movies, she turns into the characters she played, in different eras and in different genres, and fantasy becomes confused with reality.The movie's conceit is interesting. How it is carried out, not so much. At times, the story becomes a bit too confusing. A more straight- lined screenplay would have helped.Note: Though she doesn't look terribly like her, Chiyoko Fujiwara is obviously inspired on Setsuko Hara (born in 1920), the beautiful actress who starred in many of the best films of Yasujiro Ozu (she was the understanding daughter in law in Tokyo Story), and also in some films of Akira Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse. Hara not only retired from cinema, but also has rejected any interviews for 50 years, living an apparently recluse life in Kamakura, the Tokyo suburb where many Ozu's films are set (and where Ozu himself is buried). In the movie, Fujiwara seclusion is due to an early romantic disappointment. As far as I know, no one knows the reason of Hara's disappearance from public life.Interestingly, director Satoshi Kon was born in 1963, the same year Setsuko Hara retired from cinema (and also the same year Yasujiro Ozu died). Kon unfortunately died of cancer in 2010; Setsuko Hara incredibly, is alive as of 2015.

Brilliant ! Beautiful ! Heartbreaking and hilarious.A uniquely told story, with a mystery that kept me on the edge of my seat, laughing, crying, and everything in between.The artistic geniuses of Madhouse animation have done it again, bringing us an exquisitely animated feast for the eyes. There are so many "wow" moments in this film, with great attention to realistic details, textures, and shadows. Millennium Actress is truly a visual masterpiece. This is a MUST SEE film for fans of anime, and anyone who likes a slightly surreal, mysterious, amusing, yet heart-tugging story.The only thing this film left me wanting was : more.

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.

Millennium Actress is a multilayered story told in a succession of beautifully composed, film-inspired moments, which traces the fortunes of Japan during the twentieth century through the prism of the experiences of screen star Chiyoko Fujiwara. Satoshi Kon is far too interesting a director to settle for a conventionally happy conclusion to Chiyoko's quest. He litters her path with earth-shattering events perpetually reducing her world to rubble. Through it all Chiyoko perseveres, acknowledging in her final moments that what has motivated her perhaps more than love of a man is love of the chase itself. The animation style Kon uses is deliberately old-fashioned, with still frames and sequences where nothing but a character's mouth moves. There's more than enough complexity in the structure of the story. Simple, sometimes stark lines and colors that echo the reality on screen combine with beautiful backgrounds to create a complex and elegant meditation on the power of dreams and images, the need to forge them, and the life-changing impact of finding your own star to follow.