There are two big Japanese animes from 2001. Millennium Actress is the other one, the one that isn’t Spirited Away. A Citizen Kane-style drama, it’s a sweet and poignant film about a documentarian and his cameraman tracking down a legendary actress who stepped away from the limelight decades before. With the studio where she spent her glory years now being demolished and the end of an era physically apparent, they decide this is the hook they need for a film about a studio and its most famous star. But will Chiyoko Fujiwara even still be alive?
Given this lead-in – and the Kane-like air of mystery which writer/director Satoshi Kon builds around his key character – it might come as a surprise that Fujiwara is on screen within minutes of the film kicking off, having granted an interview to the learned, respectful Genya Tachibana and Kyoji Ida, clueless about everything except cameras. But it’s only when Tachibana gives Fujiwara a key found at the studio that things really get going. Fujiwara stops being so formal and starts opening up about her past life. It’s corny as hell but the key unlocks everything – it is this movie’s Rosebud.
Fujiwara’s story is, to a large extent, the history of modern Japan seen through the eyes of one person. As she recounts her life – discovered as a child on the way to school and only reluctantly allowed to work in such a “dubious” profession – it tracks her chronologically through the years. A relationship with a gentle rebel artist she will spend the rest of the film trying to find again. The coming of the war and her pride at serving her country. Her professional progress, from “rank amateur” to gaining respect as an actress to becoming a legend.
This was Kon’s second film and he’s determined to show he can put together a story that’s both complex and yet easy to follow. There is narrative trickery: things start off in the traditional sepia and third-person narrative of flashback, but Tachibana and Ida have soon started appearing in the past themselves, as non-player characters observing Fujiwara’s life. The present invades the past and the past invades the present as the real and the fictional also start to overlap. It becomes increasingly difficult to work out if Fujiwara is recounting stories from her life or getting confused with films she was in. Did she really go to Manchuria, where war was raging?
The genres start to file past, the throughline being the search for the artist and love of Fujiwara’s life. One moment she is in a martial arts epic, the next a geisha drama, followed by a grim scenario in the midst of a Second World War firestorm, then a Kurosawa-style tale of everyday “modern” Japanese life. Eventually there’s even a bit of sci-fi.
Ida, resolutely modern, ignorant – us, in effect – is the bridge between Fujiwara’s world and ours. As Fujiwara speaks Ida sees her increasingly not as the old woman she now is but as a person who has been many things. The know-nothing slacker learns respect.
It can be compared to Ghibli – the questing nature of the story and its lurch into the fantastical – but the animation is more minimalist, carrying just enough detail to convey what’s going on. Ghibli doesn’t make the stylistic switcheroos Kon delivers either. At one point Godzilla even turns up.
In the end Fujiwara makes overt what’s been obvious all along. The sought-after artist was never going to be found. He was a narrative device, she all but says, which is naughty and funny simultaneously. It was the seeking she enjoyed – haven’t we all too?, Kon nudgingly appears to be asking.
Brilliant though Spirited Away is, it’s strange that there isn’t room for this movie too in the annals of anime, where it seems to get barely a look-in. Kon only made four movies and one TV series in a life brought to an early end by pancreatic cancer aged only 46. Is this his best film? Possibly, though Paprika – more complex, reality-straddling, dreamy travels – might have something to say about that.
Millennium Actress – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
