“After all, it is the chasing after him I really love,” said the female astronaut, sitting on the spaceship, prepared to take off and to follow the person she promised to find. As the engine ignites, the camera zooms out and the whole picture shrinks into a small monitor. The perspective of the scene changes to that of a dark office, where a man is watching that same rocket from the monitor, revealing the previous sci-fi setup was just a scene from a film. However, with the rocket starting to lift off, not only the footage on screen begins to flicker up and down, the entire office also seems to be affected and shakes violently. The man quickly stands up and covers his head, yet the shake is already over. The door opens and another man walks in, revealing there was an earthquake. The two then leave the office, leaving the screen turned on. The camera zooms back in at the monitor, where the footage rewinds itself, showing footage from multiple films set in different eras, all starring the same actress who played the female astronaut from the beginning. And the title card fades in.
Millennium Actress. Studio Madhouse, 2001.
This is the opening scene of the 2001 Japanese animated drama film Millennium Actress, directed and co-written by Satoshi Kon, and produced by Studio Madhouse. Released in the same year as Spirited Away by Studio Ghibli, Millennium Actress performed modestly, only earning $37,285 during its full three-week release in the US according to IMDb. In comparison, Spirited Away became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history until 2016, with a total collection of over 355 million USD worldwide. Unlike animations from Ghibli, Kon’s films are not meant for everyone to watch. The frequent uses of experimental editing techniques that manipulate with the audience's understanding of space and time make its story hard to digest even for adult viewers. In this first and a half minute opening of the film, through the seamless transition, a match cut, between scenes from the rocket launch to an unexpected earthquake, Satoshi Kon has already given the audiences a glimpse of the magic of editing that blurs the line between reality and fantasy. Millennium Actress, like other films by Satoshi Kon, is about the interaction between dreams, memories, nightmares, movies and life. And the matching images are how he links the different worlds.
The film follows a television interviewer Genya Tachibana with his cameraman making a documentary about the history of the now torn down Film Studio Ginei and its most famous star, Chiyoko Fujiwara. Disappeared from the screen for over thirty years, She agrees to a rare interview, where she guides the two crewmen through her life story and illustrious career. Yet the two quickly begin to blur together, as Chiyoko’s memory becomes part of her films themselves. The film is, as New York Times calls it, “a headlong cartoon love letter to the grand tradition of post-World War II live action Japanese Cinema,” from Samurai, urban drama, Godzilla to Space Opera. The title Sennen Joyū(千年女優), translates into the thousand year actress, comes from Chiyoko’s work which spans a period of a thousand years from Heian era to a future space age. Like other Kon’s works, Millennium Actress plays with this mix of objective reality and subjective experience, or memories of its characters, blurring the line between history and fiction. Chiyoko’s biographical retelling of her life story soon blends into the plots of her feature films, making the audiences question whether what they are seeing is real. The two documentarians, initially serving as audiences’ stand-in, are also dragged into the strange world of Chiyoko’s mixed memories, and eventually blend in and become characters in her story, both fictional scenes and real events.
Chiyoko’s story begins in her teenage years when she runs into an anti-government rebel artist, who she shields from police and investigators. In return, the artist gives Chiyoko the key, as he claims, to unlock “the most important thing there is.” When he is eventually discovered and leaves, she chases after him by taking acting jobs in the locations where she thinks he may have travelled. As Chiyoko’s chasing and acting continues, from scene to scene, instead of seeing her in the role of an actress, the audiences see the character she portrays as she uses her passion to find the painter to both drive and influence her acting. As the memories of events in the past get warped to more closely align with the films she was working on at the time, Chiyoko’s fellow actors, others in her life and even the two cameramen all become half-fictional characters. Dramatic situations in real life turn into fictional conflicts in her works, and her desire to chase after the painter is overlaid on top of her characters’ similar desire. Her journey is one about the chase, the running towards the goal, which is also the theme of this film.
Satoshi Kon, the director, is considered one of the industry’s most influential figures both within animation and outside it in Japan and internationally. Kon’s work is a testament to this medium and the limitless possibilities it has. There is something that makes Satoshi Kon’s chapter in animation history unique and irreplaceable. Until his sudden passing in 2010, Kon had a reputation for pushing the boundaries of convention, putting the audience into the headspace of his characters. Perhaps Kon himself, like Chiyoko, was on a chase.
The film takes the word chase quite literally. Chiyoko is always running, both in her movies and real life. All the climaxes in the film are composed of montages of her running, riding and driving. And all these montages, edited by Satoshi Kon, are connected by match cuts. In the film, a match cut is a transition from one shot to another where the composition of the two shots are matched by action, graphic, or subject. In the interview with Jason Gray for Midnight Eye, Kon said he did not want to direct live actions, mostly because his editing would be “much too fast for audiences to follow.” Animation presents a unique opportunity for complete creative freedom. Every frame was a blanck canvas, filled in from nothing, such that everything the audience sees on screen is a choice.
Around the time Millennium Actress was produced and released, the animation industry was experiencing a drastic change. The first Toy Story by Pixar released in 1995 was the first entirely computer animated feature film, beginning the second golden age of animation. With the advent of Pixar, the industry began to shift to a different approach, CGI, to animation that was more cost-effective and profitable. At the turn of the 20th century, Pixar’s CG features quickly dominated the box office, while Disney’s hand-animated films were earning less and less. The 2003 Pixar feature Finding Nemo achieved a stunning number of 940 million dollars of box office worldwide.
The triumph of CGI in western animation also had influenced the Japanese animation industry. Yet unlike western animated films, the Japanese studios took a different approach on the employment of 3D computer graphics. While their feature films still remained largely hand-drawn, some process of the production had already begun to adopt the use of CG as assistance. For conservative studios like Ghibli, it had been a struggle to fully embrace this computerized path. Even though the 2004 feature film Howl’s Moving Castle was produced digitally, the studio director Hayao Miyazaki, remained an old-fashioned artist, insisted on drawing all characters and backgrounds by hand. Then during the production of his next film, Ponyo, Miyazaki further prioritized hand-drawn animation by shutting down the computer graphics department at the studio. Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki’s producer and longtime collaborator talked about this stubbornness of Miyazaki during an interview with Margaret Talbot. “When silents moved to talkies, Chaplin held out the longest,” he said. “When black-and-white went to color, Kurosawa held out the longest. Miyazaki feels he should be the one to hold out the longest when it comes to computer animation.”
While Hayao Miyazaki held such craftsmanship towards traditional production of animation, Satoshi Kon’s mind was more flexible. Millennium Actress and its following films like Paprika all involved the use of computer graphics. “It's true that the attitude of directors towards how to employ CG differs from person to person. Our wish is for analog animation to swallow digital animation.”(Kon) He and Studio Madhouse were able to adapt to the trend of new technology, embrace its advantage while staying aware of the potential negative impact brought by such convenience and keeping the work unaffected. Compared to Hayao Miyazaki, Kon was more like an artist and filmmaker than a craftsman, chasing for the idealized image by all means.
All of Kon’s works feature a young female protagonist. “Female characters are easier to write,” Kon explained in another interview from Midnight Eye, “With a male character I can only see the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking.” In Japanese animation, young female characters are always referred to as the term Shoujo, which literally translates to young woman. It is a model of identity “shaped by the patriarchal society and men’s desire”(Berndt 4), which is often criticized for a retrograde view and objectification of women, as a product of male gaze. The concept of the male gaze is formalized by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. It describes the power gap inherent in depictions of women in media through a male lens, particularly as objects for male desires. The character Chiyoko, in a way, is the product of Kon’s version of male gaze. “On the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it's the opposite sex and I don't know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe.” (Kon) Certainly, the male gaze plays an important role in his work, as he masterfully uses it to help construct narratives of feminine images that defy the gendered stereotypes in the Japanese animation industry. In the case of Millennium Actress, the film centers around the female identity and the effect male gaze has on it, both positively and negatively. The story, on the surface, appears to be a feminist tale of a woman pushing back against the forces that try to confine her, to reach her own sense of purpose. On the one hand, Chiyoko seems to be independent and has control over her own life, and the lens through which it is viewed. On the other hand, her endless chase over the painter can be seen as male forces exerting control over her. Beyond this struggle lies the constructive collaboration of the perspectives of Chiyoko and Genya the interviewer. Genya’s gaze, unlike the typical male gaze, does not oppose Chiyoko’s own vision but works in tandem with it. It is the respectful admiration to Chiyoko’s story, rather than an attempt to control it. “We developed the structure in such a way so that only when the two stories overlap, the entire view of this film appears in front of your eyes. When you listen to Chiyoko's story alone, you can see only her subjective view of the story. But, when Tachibana's story comes into the scene, you obtain a full-scale perspective,” said Sadayuki Murai, the screenwriter, in an 2003 interview with Dreamworks. In the end, Chiyoko reaches a state of self-determination, freed from the control of external forces. She sees what she was really after, which is not the painter she loved but herself chasing after him.
Millennium Actress is a testament to the power of the relationship between art and artist, “When you are watching it, through the person called Chiyoko, you feel a love for Japanese Cinema, the director’s love for it,” said the voice actor of Chiyoko in an interview from the documentary The Making Of Millennium Actress, “The shadow that Chiyoko pursues is perhaps Cinema itself for the director.” And it probably is not a coincidence that Chiyoko’s love, who she spent her lifetime chasing, is an artist. The process of making art is a chase itself, yearning for the idealized image. However, the beauty is less in the endpoint, as it is more about the rich colors painted along the way. The film is also a demonstration of how art affects and defines us. Chiyoko’s films embodied her spirit, as the two ultimately became intertwined, her spirit lives on through her work, much like Kon’s through his. There is a bridge between artists and viewers, a connection formed in the process of the creation and consumption of artwork. No matter where this bridge leads, the connections are invaluable. That is what makes art truly eternal.
Works Cited
Berndt, Jacqueline. Introduction: Shōjo Meditations. Shōjo Across Media, Palgrave Macmillan,
2019, pp. 1-24.
Kon, Satoshi. Interview by Tom Mes. Midnight Eye, 11 February 2002,
Kon, Satoshi. Interview by Jason Gray. Midnight Eye, 20 November 2006,
Kon, Satoshi and Sadayuki Murai. Interview by Dreamworks. Internet Archive, 20 November
2006,
Kon, Satoshi, director. Millennium Actress. Studio Madhouse, 2001.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, 01 October
1975, Pages 6–18,
Scott, A. O. “FILM REVIEW; To the Samurai and Godzilla, With Love.” The New York Times,
The New York Times, 12 September 2003,
Talbot, Margaret. “The Auteur of Anime: A visit with the elusive genius Hayao Miyazaki.” The
New Yorker, The New Yorker, 17 January 2005,
