The Anime Masterpiece That Outshone Spirited Away in 2001

Most of us met Spirited Away in a theater in 2001 and had our brains melted by how gorgeous it looked. Totally fair. But here’s the wrinkle: that same summer, at the Fantasia Film Festival in Canada on July 28, 2001, Satoshi Kon quietly premiered Millennium Actress. Miyazaki had the obvious, all-ages fantasy hit; Kon delivered a surreal, dizzyingly smart drama that never got the same oxygen, even though it absolutely deserved it.

Two very different gems, same moment in time

Side-by-side, Spirited Away and Millennium Actress are apples and oranges. Beyond the release year, they’re nothing alike. One is a fairy-tale odyssey; the other is a memory maze built out of a lifetime of movies. But Kon’s film belongs in the same conversation as Miyazaki’s, not as an undercard, but as a peer.

If you care about the numbers: Spirited Away sits around an 8.6 on IMDb, a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and roughly an 8.77 on MyAnimeList. Millennium Actress trails by inches, with about a 7.9 on IMDb, 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ~8.24 on MyAnimeList. That’s a tight race for two wildly different films.

So what is Millennium Actress, really?

The movie centers on Chiyoko Fujiwara, a legendary screen star who walked away from the spotlight and went radio silent for three decades. When a small doc crew finally gets an interview — Genya Tachibana, who is both filmmaker and die-hard fan, and his cameraman, Kyoji Ida — their visit to Chiyoko’s home turns into something much stranger and more personal than a standard career retrospective.

Kon has fun smashing the boundary between Chiyoko’s roles and her actual past, so scenes slip seamlessly between her films and her memories until you’re chasing a moving target called 'reality.' It isn’t as brutal as Perfect Blue or as brain-warping as Paprika, but it still packs a punch nearly a quarter-century later. The visuals sing, the editing is razor precise, and the emotional range is sneakily huge — from Genya’s ride-or-die devotion to Chiyoko to Eiko’s simmering jealousy, there’s a lot of texture here. Spirited Away is a lighter, more fable-like ride; Millennium Actress digs harder into longing, regret, and the stories we tell to survive.

Kon vs. Miyazaki: different lanes, both elite

Miyazaki conjures fantasy worlds and smuggles in heavy themes under gentle, storybook vibes. Kon takes the opposite route: he makes the ordinary feel uncanny, then lets the uncanny feel painfully human. No one blended the real and the imagined quite like the late Satoshi Kon, and you can feel his fingerprints all over later live-action cinema. Perfect Blue and Paprika didn’t just influence Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan or Christopher Nolan’s Inception — there are moments that play like direct visual echoes.

And Kon wasn’t shy about tricky subjects. Tokyo Godfathers, for example, centers a found family that includes a trans character portrayed with warmth and dignity — a choice that read as remarkably forward-thinking in the early 2000s.

Release dates, untangled

Millennium Actress premiered at Canada’s Fantasia Film Festival on July 28, 2001, then opened in Japan on September 14, 2002. That double-date timeline explains why you’ll see both years associated with it.

Kon’s run in context

Perfect Blue landed in Japan on February 28, 1998 as a psychological horror/thriller and holds about an 8/10 on IMDb. Millennium Actress arrived September 14, 2002, generally labeled a drama, with an IMDb score around 7.8–7.9. Tokyo Godfathers (adventure/comedy) followed on November 8, 2003, at roughly 7.8/10. Paprika closed out his feature film quartet on November 25, 2006 — science fantasy, surreal, very adult in tone — at about 7.7/10. Four films, zero wasted moves.

• Where to watch right now: Millennium Actress is streaming on Prime Video, Tubi, and Crunchyroll; Spirited Away is on Prime Video.

The bottom line

Spirited Away earned every ounce of its icon status. Millennium Actress earns something different: it stares straight at memory, myth, and identity and finds something tender and haunting. In the areas it chooses to compete — editing, structure, emotional complexity — it goes toe-to-toe with Spirited Away and sometimes outclasses it.

Your turn: if you had to pick one, which do you go back to — the bathhouse or the time machine made of movies — and why?