By Jonathan Clements.

The approach of the year 2000 was fraught with a sense of commemoration and closure. Various media tried to put a cap on Japan’s last ten turbulent decades. On television, for example, the TBS mini-series 100 Years: The Story of One Century (2000) would chronicle the experiences of a group of Japanese women, several generations of the same family, all played by the same actress. Nanako Matsushima hence became a Japanese everywoman, transformed only superficially, in clothes, hair and cosmetics, from the woman she had been at the turn of the century. In Kon’s Tone, a book charting “the road to Millennium Actress,” the director Satoshi Kon mentioned some of the documentary serials airing on Japanese television at the time he was writing the outline, including Images of the Showa Era and Images of the Twentieth Century.

Film technology itself was in a state of flux. When we first see Genya Tachibana, the point-of-view character in Kon's Millennium Actress, he is reviewing Chiyoko Fujiwara’s movie appearances on VHS video tape, the death of which had already been announced in 1999, after Bandai Entertainment released its Tenamonya Voyagers straight to DVD in the United States. With DVD on the rise, particularly after the release of the PlayStation 2 in March 2000, VHS was on the verge of turning into a legacy format. Kon’s camera lingers on Genya’s TV screen as the tape spools backwards, lovingly recreating the onscreen tracking static that was familiar to 1990s cinephiles, and is doubtless unknown to many of today’s digital viewers. By the time the film commenced production, much of the anime business was already operating on digital paint and trace. Millennium Actress was supposedly one of the last big features to be made with the old cel methods – subsequent animated films, even when retaining the cel-painted look, would be made entirely within a computer.

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