there's meta and then there's anime meta

When the camera man turns to his boss the interviewer and asks when "When did this turn into a movie?", they had me.

I think I'm going to like Millenium Actress quite a bit.


EDIT: I have to pause to run to the computer every few minutes because I AM ENRAPTURED. This is a beautiful, beautiful film for the eyes to see.

EDIT: Dude, one second she's a warrior princess disguised as a travelling woman, now she's a Konoha-esque babyninja. Who even does log-replacement no jutsu. ::whistles::

Final review: Millenium Actress

Well, I finished the movie.

( spoilery thoughts )

The pretty

Well, this film is fucking AMAZING when it comes to the pretty. This is probably in my top 5 choices of "beautiful animation." I don't know what the other 4 are because I've never really made a list before, but this one has to be way up there.

The art design! The settings! The costumes! The fluidity and clarity of motion! The color! The transitions! The framing! The fucking mise en scene! And you know a movie has to be good if it makes me actually recall vocabulary from the one film class I took.


The writing

The head-trip! The symbolism! The pacing! The recurring characters interwoven between the real and unreal! The meta! The crazy WTF enthralling gorgeousness of it all put together!


The overall

I find it hard to find anything I dislike about this movie. I can't imagine finding someone over the age of say 15 who wouldn't find something to like/appreciate/love in this movie. I mean, what's not to love?

I guess if your mind is so one-dimension you absolutely must have one-dimensional A-B-C storytelling then you wouldn't like this movie... but actually I didn't find it as confusing as I expected from reading people's reviews. While it jumps around a lot, it's not as hard to understand as FLCL (which was so hidden in the randomness, whereas nothing in this film is random), and it's not inverted backward like movie Memento was.

The storyline is actually very linear. It just...swivels. And the line it swivels around is the line between what is real and what is imagined.

Nevertheless, despite the...swivelyness of the story's path, the characters kept you grounded and I never felt lost. In constrast, I felt caught up in it.

In certain ways that it mixed the real and unreal of a biographical story it reminded me of Big Fish, though I hate to make that comparison because a) this is a better movie than Big Fish was, and b) they're about very different things and are executed very differently, and... hell. I don't know why I'm comparing them. It's just the way that you're not sure how much of what you see is real or not, and the fact that in the end, the thin line between doesn't even matter.


Gah. I need... icons. And... the OST. I need to find the OST for this movie. And then I need to get money so I can go out and buy the DVD.

I wish I had gone to see this in the theater when it was released here. This would have been a good film to see on a big screen.

sucky sucky long time. I can't study like this!

[Poll #510844]