Frames of a Lifetime: Discovering the Magic of “Millennium Actress”

Plot Summary:

Directed by Satoshi Kon, the animated film, Millennium Actress, follows the story of a widely-acclaimed film star, Chiyoko Fujiwara. The movie starts with one of Chiyoko’s famous acting roles depicting a young woman boarding a rocket ship headed into space to go after her beloved one. The scene transitions, showing a middle-aged man watching the movie and experiencing an earthquake. Genya Tachibana and his assistant/cameraman, Kyoji Ida, head out to meet with the famous retired actress, Chiyoko Fujiwara. Genya and Kyoji go to the site where Ginei Studios is being torn down to film the shot for a documentary fully centered on Chiyoko’s life and acting career. The pair make their way up to the secluded mountain where Chiyoko currently lives in retirement. Chiyoko’s caretaker greets them at the door and then leads them into the living room area where they will be filming the interview. Chiyko arrives, and Genya returns an old key to her. It is a very sentimental object that is used to open to “the most important thing there is.” Genya found the old key at the old studio many years prior. Another earthquake happens.  

After the earthquake stops, Chiyoko starts telling her story, starting from her birth in 1923 during the Great Kanto Earthquake which killed her father. She and her mother were well off since they operated a successful sweets shop, and the film transitions into a hyper-realistic flashback of her childhood. The scene transitions to an older gentleman who owned a film company scouting her to be an actress. In order to motivate the Japanese soldiers who were fighting in Manchuria, he needed her. Her mother was very against it. After being outside in the snow for a while venting her frustrations, she runs into a criminal who is being chased. She saves him by misdirecting the police officers. He is hidden in an abandoned storehouse, and she provides him shelter and food. He has an old key around his neck and a painting covered with fabric. He eventually is found and escapes onto a train leaving for Manchuria. She falls in love with him as a young girl.  

Chiyoko decides to follow him to Manchuria, even though she never meets him. She becomes a film star in order to hopefully meet him one day. In every film she stars in, she is presented as the sweet innocent female lead, while one of the famous actresses, Shimao Eiko, is always put into the role of the evil, older villainess. Transcending time, Genya in every episodic change puts himself into her narrative as a savior. She is always going after the shadow of the man she loved as a child. From war to space to modernity, she is single focused. In every scene, there is a constant theme of an old lady specter who haunts her and says she is trapped in a never-ending cycle of eternal love that will eventually be her doom.  

As she grows older to the point where she needs to settle down, her film director and her costar, Eiko, deceive her and hide the old key. She only finds the truth after finding the key in one of the sets that she is cleaning. She had married the director who was pursuing her due to the key being stolen from her. Eventually, a battered and bruised elder came. She recognized him as the police officer who hunted after the man she loved endlessly. He passed a letter by the anti-government man she loved. He wanted to meet her in Hokkaido as written in the letter. She desperately chases after the idea of meeting him, even though it is later revealed that the policeman had tortured and killed him and that she was chasing after a ghost the entire time.  

By the end of the film, Chiyoko reveals that the exhilaration of her life was not finding the man or ever meeting him but that she loved the feeling of chasing after love. Genya is revealed to be the young staff man many years ago who saved her from an onsite accident. Another earthquake happens at the end, and she is sent to the hospital. She dies at the hospital after saying farewell to Genya. The final scene of the movie repeats the space movie she starred in; except this time, she actually flies off into space.  

Personal Thoughts:

One of the striking features of this film is the lack of distinction between reality and fiction. Even though it is a documentary featuring Chiyoko’s famous acting roles, the stories she retells is blurred quite often. Her personal motivations bleed into her works. The main story she decides to tell is that of chasing after love and rarely contains the actual content of the films she worked on. What is most fascinating is the color schemes used in the movie. When diving into her films that she starred in or her past, all of the people are shaded either monotone or darkened; whereas, Genya and Kyoji are brightly colored and represents the current reality blending into the past stories. A fun detail they included was multiple breaks into the main flashbacks, showing that Genya and Chiyoko were actually acting out the scenes in colorful ways.  

The most important theme and representative object used in Millennium Actress was unattainable love and the old key. The old key was a symbolic object that linked her to her past love. The most important thing in Chiyoko’s life as a person in love and as an actress was her determination to push through for love, whether it was realistic or not. The significance of the stolen key and then lost key was her faltering periods where she fell away from that conviction. The stolen key was her love being deceived and taken by the director she married. The lost key represented a sense of disillusionment with her life’s choices. What was left, after she found out that the man who she loved had died such a terrible death? What was left, after she discovered that she would never attain what she wanted as she was not who she once was?  

Although to the audience it may seem like she spent her life in vain, I actually would counter that misconception. I truly believe that she felt fulfilled by the end of her life, even though she lived in isolation. Her life was filled with the love of chasing after love, and so she felt like she had completed that journey. Even in death, she promised to continue that chase. Personal fulfilment and motivation were essential, as like the title suggests, she truly lived a millennium life. Over the span of her life, she survived multiple major wars, including the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Perhaps what this film was trying to convey was the depth of a life spanning decades upon decades in an unconventional way.