Anime Movie Rewind: Millennium Actress
Nov. 20th, 2022 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOne of the more specious reasons I can worry talking up “sampling bits of anime from ‘multiple decades’ over a few weeks or months” amounts to “foolish boasting” is how counting in “decades” doesn’t always mean working with honest ten-year chunks. When moving on to the next anime movie I’d planned to watch in the last weeks of this year meant jumping back from “the middle of last decade” to “just after the turn of the century,” though, I could at least keep considering some thoughts I’ve been having for a while now. Specific years I think back to without coming up with all that many personally memorable titles have turned up scattered through time; it’s probably better to accept all things being impermanent, including better runs of luck. However, with the safety of distance from this century’s first decade, I can at least wonder now if there’d been something after all to the tough time liking new titles from then a certain number of anime fans who’d been around for only a little longer than me had kept making a big deal of in particular discussion circles.
While not many anime movies from that time of brittle success shading into collapse and twilight recovery jumped out at me now, I was at least interested in getting to Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress. Having put off watching it until now just perhaps out of worries like “will it all be downhill from here?” did mean I could first experience it on Blu-Ray rather than DVD. While I could suppose from the start it wouldn’t confront me with “it was made with new production methods, but for ‘standard definition,’” one of the more neutral reasons why anime from its time might be less impressive now, it did look “older” in a familiar way. Having already seen Paranoia Agent and Perfect Blue, I was more or less ready to be caught up in an interview with a retired actress blurring the present, the past, and movies themselves; it was rather more light-hearted and comedic than the dissolving realities of those two other titles even if there was some stronger emotional impact near the end. With this movie watched I’m ready to stay on my own journey back through time; my next jump should be shorter.
While not many anime movies from that time of brittle success shading into collapse and twilight recovery jumped out at me now, I was at least interested in getting to Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress. Having put off watching it until now just perhaps out of worries like “will it all be downhill from here?” did mean I could first experience it on Blu-Ray rather than DVD. While I could suppose from the start it wouldn’t confront me with “it was made with new production methods, but for ‘standard definition,’” one of the more neutral reasons why anime from its time might be less impressive now, it did look “older” in a familiar way. Having already seen Paranoia Agent and Perfect Blue, I was more or less ready to be caught up in an interview with a retired actress blurring the present, the past, and movies themselves; it was rather more light-hearted and comedic than the dissolving realities of those two other titles even if there was some stronger emotional impact near the end. With this movie watched I’m ready to stay on my own journey back through time; my next jump should be shorter.