If you don’t feel like watching the European Football Championship, you shouldn’t miss the following animated masterpiece. The Millennium Actress, released in 2001 by director Satoshi Kon (Paprika), is a moving story about a great love (of the cinema) and is on TV today. The boundaries between films and reality are blurred so skillfully that even fans of Birdman or Inception will experience one or two surprises.
In Millennium Actress, reality and fiction blur
Millennium Actress tells a multi-layered journey through Japanese history, cinema and the secret dreams of a woman who spends her life in front of the camera. The focus is on the actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who long after the end of her career looks back on her life for a documentary.
As a teenager, during the Sino-Japanese War, she meets an artist and dissident, but loses sight of him. Over the years, she hopes to see him again, even when she becomes a celebrated film star of Japanese cinema and marries another man – the wish never leaves her.
Check out the trailer for Millennium Actress:
Millennium Actress – Trailer 2 (German) HD
As Chiyoko tells the story, we jump through eras and genres, from dramas to monster movies, until reality and fiction in the life of the acting legend are barely distinguishable. It is hard to escape the pull of her memories.
How to watch Millennium Actress on TV tonight
If you want to watch the anime, you can do so on Pluto TV. The free, ad-financed provider recently launched our Moviepilot TV channel. It only shows films that have received good ratings from the Moviepilot community.
Millennium Actress has a very good rating of 7.3 points on Moviepilot, with over 460 votes cast. The film will be shown today, June 24th, from 8:05 p.m. on the live channel Moviepilot TV with Pluto TVwithout subscription or additional costs. Other highlights in the program for the next few days are Requiem for a Dream, Berlin Calling and Chasing Amy.
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That’s why Millennium Actress is worth it for anime fans and everyone else too
Director Satoshi Kon, who died in 2010, had a knack for surreal film journeys that draw you into the deepest depths between bright colors. Perfect Blue and Paprika hit the mark, as does his series Paranoia Agent. In Millennium Actress he also works with the question of how pop culture and reality intertwine until fictional characters are almost indistinguishable from real ones. The film is told much more gently, as a drama spanning decades that delves into the emotional world of a woman with great care.
Millennium Actress is something like a fictional biopic and at the same time a journey through Japanese cinema from Ozu to Kurosawa to Godzilla and beyond. Nevertheless, the whole thing is told and staged in a very pop style, thanks in part to the catchy electronic soundtrack by Susumu Hirasawa.
The result is a unique drama in anime form, thematically somewhere between Inception and Clouds of Sils Maria, which keeps you entertained thanks to its imaginative imagery and complex narrative, while the animated heroine Chiyoko Fujiwara plays her way into our hearts. If you’ve never seen a Satoshi Kon film, then Millennium Actress is the perfect introduction. And everyone else hopefully knows what an outstanding artist was at work here.