Millenium Actress 8/10

A movie about an interview with an old lady sure gets exciting at times.

Anime feature films rarely fall into anything other then two categories as far as I'm concerned. Great and crap. Millennium Actress was great.

The look of this movie takes alot of cues from Perfect Blue in the character designs and backgrounds. (They share the same director.) Here the Japanese characters actually look Japanese which is rare for anime and a nice change. The VAs were average but the music, what there was of it, was great. I'll buy the soundtrack if I ever stumble across it. It's pretty Japanese without the J-pop so prevalent in so much anime these days. This movie was released in 2001.

This film has a pretty good story behind the big-budget animation. An old Japanese movie studio is being torn down. Two guys producing a documentary go to interview the 70 year old former female star of the studio (Chiyoko Fujiwara) who dropped out of public life 30 years earlier. As the interview starts the two interviewers seem to live out the story of Chiyoko's life, being thrust into the past as observers while Chiyoko, at different ages through the movie, goes about her life. Her story is also told through the characters she played in movies with the interviewer getting to play a character as well. This gives the story some comic relief as he has a thing for Chiyoko and tends to play her servant or helper, falling all over himself to rush to her aid when she gets into trouble.

So what's the story about you ask? When she was young, Chiyoko helped a man wanted by the police and fell in love with him. She didn't know his name or saw his face. All she knew was that he was a painter and he gave her a key that he was to get back when they met again. The entire movie follows Chiyoko as she searches for the mystery man while acting in many movies that provide backdrops and parables for some of her real-life experiences.

To tell more would spoil it. It's a romantic movie and I liked it. Some of the movies Chiyoko was in add some pretty neat action sequences where a normal romantic movie would get boring. Recommended.