Animonday: Millennium Actress
Monday is animation day for the foreseeable future (with the exception of the week after next when I’ll be at FrightFest) and to start the ball rolling we have this award winning anime film from the director of Perfect Blue.
The story is about an actress searching for a artist she once helped escape from the authorities and who left her with a mysterious key. The film cleverly uses a couple of filmmakers making a documentary on the actress as a means to flashback through her life and career.
In someways this reminded me of Aronofsky’s The Fountain, both films tell epic love stories and both blur the line between reality and fiction (and both climax in outer space). Ultimately though this is a less satisfying experience than The Fountain with the payoff less rewarding.
Perfect Blue is one of my favourite Japanese animated features, the kind of film Argento would make if he made anime, Millennium Actress has a more pretentious feel to it, sort of arthouse anime. It’s not a bad film, just not as good or as clever as it thinks it is.
Animonday? Kewl.
Comment by Dan | August 14, 2007
Hey, don’t be so harsh- I absolutely adore this movie. It is a great anime that dares to be different; a heartfelt and emotion-rich film without giant robots or pretentious cyberspace monologues about humanity and machine. It’s a wonderful ode to cinema and the score is just sublime. I’m not ashamed to admit I shed a tear at the end, and for an animated feature to do that, well, it’s got to have something special.
Comment by ghost of 82 | August 14, 2007
Don’t get me wrong, I did get some enjoyment out of it. And I’m all for anime that gets away from giant robots and such stereotypes, that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed Perfect Blue so much. Grave of the Fireflies is another example, now that film did move me to tears. This however seemed more interested in being clever than it did in emotionally connecting with the viewer.
Comment by Ian W | August 15, 2007