Millennium Actress
Japan's ''Millennium Actress'' is a sweeping piece of animated hagiography in which a worshipful documentary filmmaker tracks down a reclusive movie star and gets her to tell her story. The actress does such a powerful job that the bumbling director and his cameraman are transported into her flashbacks as witnesses. We see both her adolescence and her years as a young adult; they often play out against grand historical and cinematic backdrops.
This guy is only slightly less taken with her than is Satoshi Kon, the writer and director of ''Millennium Actress.'' His first film was a trippy little freakout called ''Perfect Blue'' about a soft-porn starlet whose pop-singer past won't leave her alone. ''Millennium Actress'' is less exhilarating and more wholesome but just as besotted. Kon loves actresses and uses his star, Chiyoko Fujiwara, and her full life to parallel Japanese history and the history of Japanese filmmaking. Kon's point -- cinema equals memory -- is alarmingly standard-issue.
The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional. Eventually, we realize that the documentary director has an actual bond to his subject, and that his interest in her is the stuff of both crushes and kismet. At 70 years old, Chiyoko doesn't mind being adored. And it's not difficult to understand, as she's still ravishing, with a sharp gray bob and clear complexion. (If, alas, the film is not as epochal as its title suggests, ''Millennium Actress'' is nothing if not lovingly drawn.)
DreamWorks is the film's US distributor, and you can almost smell the studio sniffing for a little of the anime street cred Disney picked up last year when it released Hayao Miyazaki's hypnotic ''Spirited Away'' to Oscar-winning effect. ''Millennium Actress'' is sophisticated enough to help you see DreamWorks' own recent animated output (''Spirit'' and ''Sinbad'') for the pandering kid-vid it is.
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