Millennium Actress (2001): A

The finest anime film I’ve ever seen, Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress concerns a documentary filmmaker’s interview with legendary Japanese film actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who retired from the business 30 years earlier to live a hermetic life in her forest-shrouded home. The life story Chiyoko recounts is one which melds authentic memories with both her movies and national history, and as her tale unfolds, the documentarian himself (who has known and loved Chiyoko for years) becomes a first-hand witness to, and later an active participant in, her sprawling personal saga. Chiyoko’s lifelong search for an anti-government rebel painter she met and fell in love with as a young girl – a mystery man who gave her a beloved key “to the most important thing in the world” – becomes the focal point of not only her life but her films’ narratives, and Kon (as he did in his debut Perfect Blue) beautifully blurs the line between the real and unreal with graceful animation (highlighted by a cinematic forest fight in which his “camera” bobs and weaves with fluid energy) that invigorates his temporal-shifting narrative. His stunning film confronts issues of love, obsession and aging, yet ultimately Millennium Actress’ earthshaking virtuosity comes from its meditation on the nature of cinema itself – how moviemaking and acting (whether in dramas, comedies or documentaries) all contain competing degrees of make-believe and autobiography, and how Chiyoko’s millennium-spanning affair with romance and the movies mirrors our own.