(2002; Japanese) To commemorate the famous Ginei Studios, obsolete after 70 years of movie making, documentary director Genya Tachibana and his cameraman Torakichi (who provides touches of humor) locate the reclusive Chiyoko Fujiwara, a once popular actress, for an interview.

This adventurous anime from director Satoshi Kon, who also wrote the original story and co-wrote the screenplay, effects a wondrous evolution of its characters in a rhythm of transformations.

For thirty years Chiyoko had locked herself away from the world, living alone with her books and garden. Long-time fan of her films, Tachibana brings her a present of a key, which she had lost during an accident in the studio during the filming of her last picture. Grateful for the return of this keepsake, she unlocks her memories, beginning with her birth in 1923.

As Torakichi's camera captures the elderly woman speaking, the scene becomes the time and place of her description, with Chiyoko a schoolgirl again (but Genya and Torakicki are themselves, invisible to everyone else). A man, bleeding from a leg wound, knocks her over in the road in his attempt to escape from the police; she misdirects the authorities before going to the fugitive's aid.

An anti-government artist, a painter of white landscapes that remove the viewer to a distant world, he shows her a key hanging from around his neck, saying it belongs to "the most important thing of all." She asks him to wait until tomorrow to reveal its secret, but the next day she finds the key lying in the snow; an elderly man whispers to her that the artist has safely fled to the train station.

Chasing after him - while Genya and Torakicki hastily follow - we enter into scenes from Chiyoko's cinematic history (beginning with propaganda films during the war to the height of her celebrity in the '50s): as bandits in Manchuria attack a train in flames (a door opens) the princess finds her lord slain in the castle where a wraith offers her a cup of tea. "I hate you more than I can bear," says the hag: "I love you more than I can bear." Chiyoko swallows the thousand-year tea with the wraith's curse: "You cannot escape your fate" to "burn in flames of eternal love."

As the locations and eras change from set to set (from her roles as a medieval female warrior saved by a samurai to a geisha cast into prison to an astronaut on a doomed spaceflight), Genya (who remembers having seen and wept through most of her movies) becomes a protective character to Chiyoko in each melodrama as she pursues the man just out of her reach. Her motivation for continuing to act is that there's "always a chance he'd see one of my films."

An actress jealous of Chiyoko's youth, Eiko Shimao, steals her key during a scene together; no longer able to remember the face of the painter, Chiyoko succumbs to the seduction of her director Otaki, marrying him. Years later when she rediscovers the key, the trick Eiko and Otaki played on her becomes evident.

On a journey of atonement, a messenger on crutches with one eye delivers a message from the painter; with it Chiyoko departs for Hokkaido and eventually the moon. Along with theatrical pyrotechnics, earthquakes have significance, and the story neatly, meaningfully, satisfyingly comes full circle.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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