Secret Santa is a yearly tradition started by Alain and Kate of Reverse Thieves that has people in the blogosphere sign up for Secret Santa. Those people then send an email to their Secret Santa with a list of anime that they hopefully will like, and they write about it before, the day of, or after Christmas.
I’ve taken part of Secret Santa for the past three years, so I was definitely not turning down a 4th year. In fact, I expected to be able to cover all three of the anime I got this year. Boy was I so wrong. I still hope to watch them at some point, as they look pretty solid, but instead, I settled for a title that I just so happened to have the DVD of, but never found the time to watch.
And it happens to do with Satoshi Kon. So far, 3 out of 5 isn’t so bad?
My history of Satoshi Kon is not expansive. I once saw Perfect Blue on TV, but I was a kid and had no idea what was going on so I didn’t watch most of that. Paranoia Agent was a show I loved for a good few weeks, then slowly I stopped watching it for who knows what reason. I didn’t experience another Satoshi Kon work until 2011, when I watched Tokyo Godfathers and was blown the hell away. That was when I knew I had to check out more of his works. His past two works were hardly up to snuff. Tropic of The Sea I thought was solid, but wasn’t anything special. Then I watched Paprika, and while it looked great, I…I thought it got too nonsensical. Millenium Actress has some nonsense, but unlike Paprika, it’s obvious the story revolves around the life of Chiyoko Fujiwara, a retired actress who has agreed to be a part of a documentary by Genya Tachibana.
What Kon does with this film is, instead of obviously having Chiyoko just talk about her past life, they involve Genya and his cameraman, so Millennium Actress has a third party witness how she was told not to become an actress from her mom, her being in various films, and her accident that gave her the excuse to retire from acting. I don’t know if this was as engaging as Tokyo Godfathers, as there were times where seeing Genya inserted into Chiyoko’s past was a bit too much. However, the journey I think was rewarding, and it served as a good visual feast as it featured Chiyoko in the 1920s to the Warring States period where she gets to be a ninja to her working as an astronaut. The music I admit was fantastic yet it felt out of place with certain scenes, particularly when she was on a horse trying to escape and there’s some sort of techno music or whatever going on, which didn’t fit the era it was set.
Where I think I respect what this film did was to incorporate Chiyoko’s life in a manner where it changes from one moment of her life to one of the works she stars in to her in real life, as old as the hills, getting way into her character in front of a camera. It made it interesting and at the very least, you had to be engaged in the work. That’s where I admit it sometimes didn’t do it’s job. Don’t know if it was because I didn’t care for some of her works or what not, but some of it just didn’t work for me.
Despite that, I still enjoyed Millennium Actress. From the music to a good portion of the scenes, I didn’t mind watching it. I will probably try and watch this again at some point. That’s a good sign that I like what’s here. Thanks to my Secret Santa for picking this one!
