Is this the greatest thing you could ever buy someone for Christmas?

“I'm was so impressed by Millennium Actress. The outstanding part of it was the sensation that the characters were ‘acting’ – I really felt as if I was watching a genuine actress when I watched that movie.”

So enthused Ryuhei Kitamura, the director of films like Versus, The Midnight Meat Train and Azumi, when I interviewed him late last year for a book project that fizzled when the publishers' economic hassles kind of interfered in things.

“I'm a live-action director and movie fan," Kitamura went on, "not an animation admirer, so I always love the anime that makes me feel like I’m not watching anime at all.”

Things often change dramatically in twelve months, but one thing that hasn't is my own humble opinion that Millennium Actress (千年女優 Sennen Joyu in Japanese) is one of the greatest Japanese stories ever told. It doesn't matter that it's animated, although stylistically speaking the animation does allow the director to get away with a series of superb visual tricks that would blow your typical CG budget out of the water.

That director, Satoshi Kon, was just 46 years of age when he passed away in August this year; he was in his mid 30s when he created this masterpiece.

Put into context, Hayao Miyazaki was a year or so older than Kon when he shot his first feature (The Castle of Cagliostro) and 60 years old when he made Spirited Away - coincidentally released the same year as Millennium Actress (2001).


I'm not about to here debate the worth of Spirited Away, a movie I've seen countless times and treasure highly. As anybody who bothers to actually trawl through this blog may've noticed, I'm a big fan of Miyazaki's body of work.

But I'm going to go out on a limb here and declare something I've felt ever since I first watched Kon's Millennium Actress for the first time several years ago: It's possibly the best animated movie ever made, regardless of nationality.

This presumption comes not just because the anime itself is so worthy, but for the depth of ingenuity at play in it's conception, in the script, and in the wonderful soundtrack by electro-pop musician Susumu Hirasawa, which also rates in the top three anime soundtracks to date - alongside Joe Hisaishi's score for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Kenji Kawai's for Ghost in the Shell.

Millennium Actress is a play within a play that just so happens to be in animated form. The characters themselves are akin to those created by Akira Kurosawa or Yasujiro Ozu, the theme is grandiose, there’s suspense mixed in with unrequited love - as well as samurai, earthquakes, World War 2, and even a sci-fi flourish included for good measure.


As heart wrenching as it is invigorating, it goes still further to combine drama with tragedy, comedy with historical fancy, moments of action and violence with a piquant sense of whimsy.

Topping all this off is one of the strongest, more realistic and empathetic animated female characters in central protagonist Chiyoko Fujiwara, the actress of the title.

But the outstanding nature of Millennium Actress really shouldn’t come as any surprise since director and co-writer Kon also made Perfect Blue (1998) and Paprika (2006).

Kon’s directorial debut, Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller that owes perhaps as much to Italian horror meister Dario Argento (Deep Red) as it does to Alfred Hitchcock – and set the trend for the director’s own predilection for split personality characters and a blurring of the lines of reality/fantasy.

Kon had already cut his teeth as a supervisor on Mamoru Oshii’s excellent mecha anime feature Patlabor 2 (1993), then filled the roles of scriptwriter, layout artist and art director for Koji Morimoto on ‘Magnetic Rose’, the best part of the trilogy present in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995).

He won awards from the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Fantasia Film Festival in Montréal, and the Chicago Tribune newspaper called Millennium Actress “a piece of cinematic art”.

That movie in fact tied with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away for the Grand Prize in the Japan Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival.

“Originally the idea of Millennium Actress was that the main character – the actress – is running through her ‘subjective time’, trying to play catch up with the other key character in the story. It’s reality as well as a play within a play, and for that action we wanted to describe an eventful life story over a long period,” Kon told me in an interview we also did late last year, in October.


“The first idea was the this simple sentence: ‘Once an old actress was telling her life story, but her memory was mixed up, various roles she acted in before started to filter into the tale, and it becomes a dramatic story.’ After that, the idea that the interviewer gets into the recollections of the actress, and if the interviewer appears as a character in those recollections, literally ‘gets into the recollection’, then this would be interesting.

“Then, while padding the plot and thinking deeper about the script, the intention to add in the Japanese film history aspect,” said Kon, a huge Kurosawa fan himself, “and to integrate her development into the changes in Japan over the ensuing period – which I wasn’t consciously thinking about in the beginning. Because of this depth, Millennium Actress became a movie you can interpret in multiple layers.”

The story, on the surface, is deceptively simple.

A film crew set out to make a documentary on reclusive, elderly actress Fujiwara – but what follows is a blurring of reality, a tectonic, unpredictable shift in time-lines, and a haphazard association with the plot lines in the old movies that made Fujiwara famous.

Add to this the actress’ long-time unrequited love, a secret crush felt by the documentary crew’s director, the devastation of Japan in World War 2, samurai battles, vindictive secret police, and rocket ship exploration – all of it somehow tied together beautifully by Kon – and you have yourself an anime treasure trove.


The influences themselves are rich enough to dwell upon: from Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), which rewrote Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a samurai context, to the real-life actress Setsuko Hara – famous from the 1940s to the ‘60s in movies by Kurosawa (The Idiot, 1951) and Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, 1953), who suddenly withdrew from public life in 1963, the same year that Ozu died - and has only been viewed once or twice in the ensuing 45 years by the prying Japanese media.

Pulling it all together is Kon’s visual palette, as breath-taking as his bold philosophical brush-strokes, which together create a gripping ride that’s been known to tug the hardest of heart-strings.

“I’ve never cried watching animation before,” manga artist Aiko M. told me recently. “Everything about this movie touched my soul.”

On top of this emotional provocation, Kon’s penchant for a blurring of imagination and reality – in this case of documentary and cinema – is at its absolute best here.

“I was thinking of a story which had the structure of ‘trick’ paintings; I wanted to make a movie that’s like one of those paintings,” Kon revealed in that chat last year.

This is a man who's arguably had a significant impact on two of the contemporary Western trendsetters of cinema - Christopher Nolan (Inception) and Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) - and Millennium Actress is without doubt the director's foremost lifetime achievement, a classic piece of cinema unto itself that deserves all the recognition, respect and love it can get.

In fact I can't think of any better present to buy someone for Christmas, regardless of your religious persuasion or lack of one.


Any excuse to give this to someone you care about is a good one so far as I'm concerned, and the yuletide season gives me a good opportunity to get up on my soapbox and lecture a bit even if no one reads the cheat notes.

I got my copy of the Millennium Actress DVD from the fine people at Madman in Australia, who're wise enough to support this kind of magic - check out their version online here.

It's not often I play the capitalist tyrant demanding you spend your hard-earned dosh on something, but this movie wins one over in unexpected ways and it's just plain brilliant.

In the meantime, here's the trailer - which doesn't really do the movie justice at all.




Millennium Actress © 2001 Chiyoko Committee

RIP Satoshi Kon

I'm still reeling and coming to terms with the news that anime filmmaker, screenwriter and manga-ka Satoshi Kon (今 敏), passed away on August 24 after a struggle with pancreatic cancer.

He was just 46 years of age, and therefore only a year older than myself.

But the list of Kon's achievements is a staggering one, and for me he was one of Japan's three leading anime directors, right up there with Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away).

After all Kon - a true auteur - was responsible for the superb anime movies Perfect Blue (1998), Millennium Actress (2001) and Paprika (2006), along with the TV series Paranoia Agent.


Millennium Actress remains my favourite Kon movie.

It's as heart-wrenching as it is invigorating - and combines drama with tragedy, comedy with historical fancy, moments of action and violence with a piquant sense of whimsy.

The story itself, on the surface, is deceptively simple.

A film crew set out to make documentary on a reclusive, elderly actress named Chiyoko Fujiwara - but what follows is a blurring of reality, a tectonic, unpredictable shift in time-lines, and a haphazard association with the plot lines in the old movies that made Fujiwara famous.

Add to this the actress’ long-time unrequited love, and an equally lengthy secret crush felt by the documentary crew’s director, the devastation of Japan in World War 2, samurai battles, vindictive secret police, and rocket ship exploration – all of it somehow tied together beautifully by Kon – and you have yourself an anime masterpiece.

The influences themselves are rich enough to dwell upon – from Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), which rewrote Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a samurai context, to the real-life actress Setsuko Hara, famous from the 1940s to the ‘60s in movies by Kurosawa (The Idiot, 1951) and Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, 1953), who suddenly withdrew from public life in 1963, the same year that Ozu died, and has only been viewed once or twice in the ensuing 45 years by the prying Japanese media.

Meanwhile, Kon's Paprika is arguably to Inception precisely what Oshii's Ghost in the Shell was to The Matrix.

Late last year I had the chance to interview Kon-sama and the resulting article was published in the January 2010 issue of Impact magazine over in the UK. I forwarded on a copy of the article to him and he e-mailed me back in January to say "It will be good for my English studying. Thank you."

Which was typical of Satoshi Kon in my all-too-brief experience of dealing with a man who turned out to be humourous, genial, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and fun - he even contributed to my long-winded piece on sake.

So, as one struggling way to pass on my own personal kudos, here is much of that interview, promised in this blog a few months back. The insights are at times inspiring as much as enlightening regarding his essential body of work.



INTERVIEW - OCTOBER 2009


Why do you enjoy directing movies, and which part of creating them makes you the happiest?

“I find joy in the entire film-making process – I really enjoy every single moment along the way. From assembling the script to begin establishing the world view, then on into character designs and art setting, story boarding, and collaboration work with lots of staff for the actual drawing and background art – this all makes for a stimulating experience, and there’s so much stuff I want to do in editing or in the acoustic work, too. Whatever the output, be it a sentence, a picture, or a sound, concreting the idea together is someone who is, after all, nothing but an anime fan.

“After the movie is completed, visuals creation or interview to advertise is a very important mission too; these are great opportunities to look back at the way I directed and what kind of movie I ended up with. In the course of film making, there are actually no jobs I don’t appreciate – though of course it’s not fun to give up or compromise an idea for the budget or tight schedule, I believe those decisions are going to be beneficial for the entire movie world, so I never think those are negative things either. A strategic withdrawal is sometimes necessary, and it’s an important decision to make.


“Among these fun-filled processes, I prefer doing the storyboard.

"When I’m doing this, I really feel like I’m ‘making the movie’. Even if they’re the still images, the story is visualized by connecting pictures, so it’s like letting the actors act, shoot them, and edit them – all on paper.

"Everything about my film making is on the storyboard.

“I was originally a manga artist – so therefore, controlling the storyboard is really easy for me since the style of story boarding is like doing comics. Manga artists are good at drawing tiny pictures within the frames; the only major difference between storyboarding and a comic is the fact that the storyboard is the blueprint to move characters, and the time flow, divided by 24 frames per second, becomes the important factor.”


How would you personally describe the kind of movies you make?

“It’s difficult to answer to that kind of wide-ranging question!” [laughs]

“But if I do dare to put into words the movies I have been directed, it would be ‘fantasy based on a world that has reality’. To only describe the real world is not enough, and only fantasy is far too sweet to have. Therefore, I’ve wanted to make something that has reality in its foundations, then take off from there and fly into the domain called fantasy. Quite basically this mentality hasn’t changed since I was drawing manga, before making anime. I can’t say for sure that this philosphy will continue into the future, however.”


It's been said that "Satoshi Kon's forte [speciality] is in the surreal interaction of reality and dreams - which often drift into nightmares." Would you agree?

“Of course. The interaction of reality and dreams is a motif I still have interest in, and I keep bringing it back into my work. Since my debut Perfect Blue [1998] got attention for that motif, I intentionally used it as a central focal point in Millennium Actress, Paprika, and so on. I think the way in which I’ve handled this, along with my workmanship skills, have got better and better after using this motif several times.

“However, it’s not healthy to keep using the same motif again and again, neither for the audience nor creators – even when utilized in a different context. So I think it’s better for me to steer away from ‘the surreal interaction of reality and dreams’ for a while, though I’m still interested in the theme.”


You did your first script for Magnetic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto and based on the work of Katsuhiro Otomo, in 1995. How was that experience for you?

"Magnetic Rose became the movie that gave me the first opportunity to use the ‘interaction of reality and dreams’ concept, but at that point I wasn’t sure how to place and blend reality and dreams, so my technique and workmanship were simple. Still, there's no doubt the experience with that script led to the common characteristics of my work, and that became the big turning point in my creation history. I was in charge of script, art setting, and layout. I liked the story and visual factor, though at the same time I often felt the differences between my interpretation and the producers'. But I can say that it made me interested in the directing job so it certainly was memorable for me."


Millennium Actress (2001) is a wonderful movie that manages to reflect Japan's changes in the years before World War 2, and since then. Was this your intention?

"The answer can be yes and no; it depends to which ‘intention’ belongs. Originally the idea of Millennium Actress was for the main character, the actress, to run through her subjective time – which in reality is a play within a play – and for that we wanted to describe an eventful life story over a lengthy period.

“Then, while padding plot lines and thinking about the script, the idea dawned on me to insert a Japanese film history aspect and integrate the actress character’s development; it became a movie you can interpret in multiple layers. The notion of change in Japan itself filtered out during the film making process, which I hadn’t thought about in the beginning. I wouldn’t say that I became familiar with history through making this movie, but Millennium Actress is a special film which gave me the opportunity to rethink the relationship between me and my country.”


In Millennium Actress reality and unreality become blurred, and it becomes a story within a story. Could you tell us more about the development of the script?

“The plan for Millennium Actress got started by a call from a producer who’d just watched Perfect Blue.

“I began by thinking about a story which has the structure of ‘trick’ paintings, since the producer told me that he wanted to make a movie that was as much like a ‘trick’ painting as Perfect Blue apparently was for him. The first inkling of an idea was a sentence, and it was this: ‘Once upon a time an old actress talks about her life, but her memory is scrambled, mixed with various roles she acted in, and together this creates a dramatic story.’ I made a rough plot from this first memo.”


It's said that the character of Chiyoko Fujiwara is loosely based upon real-life actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine. Is this true? What other influences shaped her character?

“As the image model, as you say, Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine are the actresses who represented the postwar movies, but I was influenced by a lot of other actresses too. In Chiyoko’s background, the actress who retires all of the sudden is sourced from Setsuko Hara, while the bright smile in the chaos after the war comes from Hideko Takamine’s image. However, those influences are more about the ‘appearance’ images I borrowed; to create Chiyoko’s personality, I didn’t refer to any real actress. Of course, I was going through Ms. Takamine’s bio and many actresses’ interviews, so probably there might be parts I included from those without being conscious about it.”


And then there’s Paprika, the movie Kon released through Madhouse in 2006. The opening minutes of the movie introduce the pivotal character of police detective Konakawa and his recurring nightmare – which revolves around the spliced-and-looped discovery of a homicide victim. You then undercut this traumatic vignette with references to a roll call of Hollywood standards, like Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, Tarzan the Ape Man, Roman Holiday, and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, all rolled up into one sweet dream sequence. Which foreign film directors have most influenced you over the years, and why so?

“It’s a difficult question. John Ford, Billy Wilder, Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, George Roy Hill, Robert Altman – it’s endless. I can’t limit myself to the one. For dream sequences and the like Terry Gilliam stimulated me, especially in the beginning of Time Bandits, in Brazil, and in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. These are my favourite movies. For the technique to connect different times and space, I was hugely influenced by George Roy Hill’s version of Slaughterhouse-Five.

"However, for the basic idea of the movie, I think I learned more from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa than overseas directors. I don’t have nerve to say I’m influenced by him, since I just learned, but I often read Akira Kurosawa’s director interviews or his crew’s interviews while making my own movies.

“Of course there are important directors like Yasujiro Ono, Kenji Mizoguchi, Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi, Kihachi Okamoto, Kon Ichikawa, et cetera, but there is no one like Akira Kurosawa – who produced numerous masterpieces and who defined such strength of image. People can identify his work at a glance. Not only the acting or look, but the theme music, art, camera angles, the light, the tools or cloths... everything.”


ADDENDUM

At the time of our chat Kon was gearing up for the release of his long-awaited next anime movie Yume Miru Kikai (The Dreaming Machine), again through Studio Madhouse.


"This is my own original story - therefore different from my previous work," Kon advised at the time.

"While I was developing the script, I heard about a movie called WALL·E... and I got a little nervous that it might be similar to mine. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I learned that the two stories were totally different," he laughed.

"In The Dreaming Machine, only robots are there. I want the audience to enjoy the adventures of robots who survived even after their parents - human beings - had become extinct. After Paprika, I ended up taking a vacation for over a year, so we've just started development on this. You can see this movie in 2011."

I'm not sure what Madhouse's plans for the movie may now be, or how far Kon had gotten in the production of the movie.

According to Wikipedia, Kon left a final statement on his blog here. There's a translation in English also here.

There's nothing really more to add here, except: Respect. We'll miss you, mate.





IMAGE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS

Perfect Blue © 1997 Madhouse / Paranoia Agent © Satoshi Kon・MADHOUSE/PARANOIA AGENT COMMITTEE / Millennium Actress © 2001 Chiyoko Committee / Paprika © 2006 Madhouse/Sony Pictures Entertainment (Japan) Inc.

SPOTLIGHT: An Actor’s Revenge (1963)

Released to celebrate the 300th role of iconic Japanese actor Kazuo Hasegawa, An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo Henge, 雪之丞変化) is a superbly eclectic offering from director Kon Ichikawa (The Harp of Burma) - as surreal as it is stylized and mesmerizing cinema.

Hasegawa plays the double-role of Yukinojo Nakamura - a kabuki actor who (like Hasegawa himself) was renowned for being an onnagata, or female impersonator - and the dashing thief Yamitaro, who likes to behaves a bit like Robin Hood.

When Yukinojo chances across the three men who drove his parents to suicide decades earlier, he sets in motion a plan for revenge worthy of Shakespeare; what he discovers he can't control are the ulterior ramifications of this revenge-play, as his actions shatter innocent lives.


It's difficult to overcome the fact that lead man Hasegawa was pushing 55 here; while he was reprising a role he played before (in 1935), he's obviously too old to push the sensuality angle of the onnagata, yet still somehow tweaks it on several levels.

For his part director Ishikawa doesn't even try to suspend disbelief - into this high drama he winds liberal doses of comedy, kabuki-style sets and visuals that are stretched out within a pop art context, and some innovative sword-fighting moments that border on the dream-like.

Realism this most certainly is not, and that's the film's beauty.

Adding to the spice in An Actor's Revenge is a modern jazz soundtrack, while the acting chops are ably supported by Shintaro Katsu (of Zatoichi fame) and the stunning Ayako Wakao, who previously shone as Eiko in Kenji Mizoguchi's The Geisha (1953), and is devastating here.

While not Ishikawa's grandest achievement, it's still a hypnagogic gem well worth the viewing, and the cool cats at Madman Entertainment in Australia are going to be releasing this in July - check here for more details.



Images © 1963 Kadokawa Pictures, inc.

PREVIEW: Satoshi Kon's The Dreaming Machine

Late last year I interviewed essential Japanese anime director Satoshi Kon (he of the notoriety of Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers, and the brilliant Millennium Actress), and that interview appeared in the January issue of Impact mag over in the UK.

I'll be running with the somewhat lengthy interview on this site sometime in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, however, Kon is gearing up for the release of his long-awaited next anime movie: Yume Miru Kikai (The Dreaming Machine) is coming up through Studio Madhouse and it has its own funky new website here. The movie features central characters called Ririco, Robin and King - and all of three are automated. Kon has dabbled quite extensively with technology (and its impact on people) before, but this time there's a different slant.


"This is my own original story - therefore different from my previous work," Kon told me during that recent interview we did; it was the first time we'd chatted and he was surprisingly open, humourous and verbose.

"While I was developing the script, I heard about a movie called WALL·E... and I got a little nervous that it might be similar to mine. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I learned that the two stories were totally different," he laughed.

"In The Dreaming Machine, only robots are there. I want the audience to enjoy the adventures of robots who survived even after their parents - human beings - had become extinct. After Paprika, I ended up taking a vacation for over a year, so we've just started development on this. You can see this movie in 2011."


Here are some sneak preview images from the new film.

Also on board is art director Nobutaka Ike, who performed the same role on Millennium Actress (千年女優 Sennen Joyu, 2001) and Paprika (パプリカ, 2006).

Till then, if you haven't checked it out already, here's the promo teaser (below) for Kon's Millennium Actress - perhaps my favourite anime flick from the 2000s, even up against stiff competition from Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Oshii's Innocence.

Essential viewing.





© 2009 Madhouse

Sake of the Day

“For me, namazake is the best kind to drink, and I’m so into Kikusui.”

So declares apprentice manga artist Eiko Magami as she refers to Funaguchi Kikusui Ichibanshibori, a canned, non-pasteurized and undiluted nihonshu.

Turns out that 99% of sake on the market has been pasteurized twice - once straight after brewing, and another time after a decent maturation period or just prior to shipping.

Namazake, like a fine wine, has not; it continues to age in the can.

“Kikusui was released in 1972, and it was the first attempt at this kind of sake at the time,” advises Ryoko Takano at Kikusui Sake Co., Ltd., which takes its name from a Noh song concerning a 700-year-old mountain hermit, and is based in Shibata in Niigata. “This is our long-time best seller because of its fresh fragrance derived from a first-pressed and non-pasteurized method, and its full-body taste derived from the undiluted process.”

The rest of this rather wayward (and much longer) homage to one of my favourite Japanese brews is going to be published through Geek Monthly in its November issue, with feedback from DJ/producer Ken Ishii, anime writer/director Satoshi Kon, and Death Note director Shusuke Kaneko - plus an extended mix of the story will be published in book-form next year. I kid you not.

Kampai.