Millennium Actress (2001)

Millennium Actress (2001) 

Dir. Satoshi Kon

Chiyoko Fujiwara is an ageing actress with a fascinating story still to tell. It'll remain untold until the proper audience is found. At the whim of fate, the proper audience finds her.

Once again, Japanese director Satoshi Kon tears down the boundaries between what's real and what's imagined, allowing past and present to overlap with fiction and reality in captured time. It's my personal favourite of his works. It's both a skilfully written love letter to the film medium and a poetic celebration of the human heart. If you hate it, you're probably dead inside.

It would take a thousand words to address all of Millennium Actress' merits, but I'm determined to keep this one short so that you can stop reading and more quickly get to the watching.

Perfect Blue (1997)

Perfect Blue (1997)

Dir. Satoshi Kon

PB explores the true cost of success for twenty-one-year-old Mima Kirigoe as she makes the difficult transition from beloved Japanese idol status to impressionable TV drama actress.

Eager to please, when the fiction in Mima's head overlaps with the fiction on the film set, shit gets real, with the kind of meaningful editing that Alfred Hitchcock might applaud, if he was alive.

Perfect Blue is director Satoshi Kon's début full-length movie, but it flows like it was his fourth or fifth. It's both a careful study of splintering, crumbling reality and a skilful exercise in artifice.

The result is a genre classic that's chilling, creepy, and can be uncomfortable viewing at times, but is highly recommended to fans of anime with bite.

Memories (1995)

Memories (1995)

Dirs: Kōji Morimoto / Tensai Okamura / Katsuhiro Ôtomo

A trio of anime shorts by creators whose names will likely be familiar to fans of the genre. The works are labelled as episodes, but they're unconnected, except for each one being based on a manga by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, creator of the seminal Akira (1982-90).

01. Magnetic Rose

Dir. Kōji Morimoto. Approx 42 mins.

Four space-faring garbage collectors respond to an unexpected mayday call. Hoping for a big reclamation score, they end up getting a lot more than they bargained for. It's written by Perfect Blue (1997) director Satoshi Kon, who adds his reality-bending skills to Ôtomo's. Music is by Yoko Kanno.

02. Stink Bomb

Dir. Tensai Okamura. Approx 39 mins.

For a regular bio-lab worker, what starts out as a simple cold turns into the worst day of his life. It's more comedic than the other two, but it nevertheless has a serious side with a grave message.