Japan Used to Tackle Themes That Were Too Earnest for Puerile Western Animation but Now All it Seems to Churn Out is Eight Seasons of 'My Teen Mom Killed Me and I Reincarnated as a Depressed Junkie in Another World'
Black Rock Shooter Vol. 243
Ripples of Anime Expo continue to follow me, which is how any information-dense episode should go. Cascading threads are almost the only ones worth pursuing; why start an avalanche if it starts and stops with "this was very interesting"?
Streamer culture is Not My Thing, but my hunt for Frieren advertisements left me with all of these lanyards for some show that was [here comes a word I will never spell right] apparently big enough to merit major publicity at the largest anime convention in the USA. It should at least be informative to give a popular new show the three-episode test, right?
The first two minutes of the first episode were incomprehensible, which is hardly a new anime experience. A far worse sin: they were boring, poorly animated, and finally full of janky CGI (which is clearly the norm now). My video player has a convenient speed-up shortcut, and I found myself hitting "]" many times... 1.2x. 1.5x. 2.0x. Then I started hitting the right arrow key to skip through entire sections. And within eight minutes I had skimmed the worst depression-and-pills fetishizing piece of shit show I've been stupid enough to click play on in years. I deserve my punishment, which is being burdened with knowledge of its existence.
It was especially foolish of me not to immediately realize that it's called Needy Girl OVERDOSE because it's about DRUGZZz (rather than the viewer overdosing on the "needy girl"). I can't say I woke up this morning hoping I'd be reaching for 2012's abysmal Black Rock Shooter as a point of comparison, but it was just dethroned of its "Most Spiritually Repulsive Anime" position. I deleted Overdose from my computer immediately after flipping through the final episode at lightning speed, after which I flew back to Los Angeles to return the lanyards. When I got back home, I clicked the next thing in my long-neglected "queue" folder to hopefully wash the bad taste out of my mouth.
Millennium Actress
"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
And Goddamn, this movie was great! I can't believe I took so long to watch it. I had been waiting for the day I'd be told "here it is on a flash drive, let's watch it tonight!" but it never came. At some point I got the movie myself and tonight I forgot all about the noise around me for an hour and a half.
The story is primarily told through Chiyoko's (the titular actress) true memories filtered through her fiction. Parts she acted in intermingled with parts she didn't. A wraith curses and haunts Chiyoko across all of her movies and gives them an illusion of interconnectivity, but this is a trick of Chiyoko's narrative. The wraith certainly appears in the film she is introduced in, but something in the character resonates with the young Chiyoko and intermittently torments her through the years.
Hating one's younger self out of a jealousy for youth and its possibilities is a mature mode of anguish. History and hardship are necessary fuel for that attitude. I originally thought the wraith plauging her through the years was another trick of Chiyoko's memory as she retraced her steps at her journey's end, but some of the later scenes in the movie strongly suggest that she was actively bothered by this psychological phantom throughout her life.
We use good fiction as a lens through which to understand our own lives, so it makes sense that artists would use their own lives to inform their fiction. Chiyoko was a great actress because she was given roles into which she could feed her own pain (she would not have succeeded as, for instance, a "Subway Sandwich Artist"). Presumably her director / sometime husband was choosing scripts specifically to fit her at the studio.
Satoshi Kon reaches for the old "unreliable narrator" gambit here as usual but, Kami-sama be blessed, you don't need to worry about dissecting it! We're following the tale of an old woman as she blurs the memories of her films with her real life. We get to sit on our couches and take slices out of her movies, then splice them together to create the reel of her actual life. The remainders of her film plots fall to the ground, but we need not reassemble the incomplete scraps anyway.
(Although, if the writer had fully sketched out the sub-movies in a scenario notebook before animation, the exercise would be more interesting and the final movie would likely be even stronger.)
One "sub-movie" plot that deserves scrutiny features Chiyoko standing over a razed city, finding a single wall surviving to support one of her posters. It doesn't take long to figure out that this is highly autobiographical for the character. Are we watching a film or a post-war memory, or something in between? As soon as we see the single wall preserving a poster of the actress as a young girl, we have our answer. The city, her destroyed potential futures, and the preserved (albeit wrapped and concealed) symbol of her youth are all very real to her. In Chiyoko's interview with the documentary crew, and maybe in her own fading memory, a painful image from life is smuggled to us through a scene of her movie. The filter of fiction shifts pain from the self to another; it's safer and easier to present fiction, while hiding life in the margins, than to candidly present the vulnerability of bare reality. Even to oneself.
The theme of "wanting 918,411,6767 followers on Twitch" will only last until this childless generation dies out. Themes of memory and age and regret under the shadow of death will persist as long as there are storytellers. The key Chiyoko wears around her neck unlocks the "most important thing". For the fugitive artist of her youth, the key opened the box holding his art supplies. For Chiyoko, it unlocked the memory of an important encounter that enabled her acting ability. Chiyoko lost her key and gave up her own art, only to find both once more at the end of her life.
But not everything needs to be a dissertation. Why should I talk any more about it? Go watch the movie yourself.
2026.07.25
