Readers who frequent my blog might have heard me mention this before, but Millennium Actress 千年女優 (2001) is my favorite Satoshi Kon film. All his four animated films ( plus the TV series Paranoia Agent ) are precious and excellent movies, but Chiyoko’s life story and the narration style touches my heart the most.

This newly released Millennium Actress Archives (千年女優 アーカイブス) art book collects illustrations, model sheets and lots of beautiful layout drawings from the film. Indeed, this is not actually the first art book ever released for the movie; back in 2002 there was the Millennium Actress Pictorial ( see my review here ) and the contents are somewhat similar, but understandably for a book that is more than 20 years old it has been out of print for a very long time and hard to get hold of.

The first section showcases promotional poster illustrations drawn by Satoshi Kon as well as many delightful fake movie posters for films that were featured in the movie. Some of these were also previously included in the Kon’s Work 1982-2010 art book, but it is certainly welcomed to have the full set collected here just for this dedicated art book for Millennium Actress.

This new art book is an improvement upon the older book in 2 ways; 1) the collection of the model sheets are reproduced on a much bigger print size, which allows for much better appreciation of the character design work that went into the making, and 2) the collection of layout drawings in this book are also bigger and definitely more numerous.

This is a most welcomed addition to the small pool of art books ever released for Satoshi Kon’s animated films, especially when the other older art book is largely out of print as I mentioned above. I hope the publisher will also release similar art books for Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers as well as Perfect Blue. Highly recommended.

I definitely recommend checking out the storyboard books for Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, Paprika as well as Paranoia Agent.

“The Millennium Actress Archives 今 敏 千年女優 アーカイブス” art book details :

Dimensions – 10.12 x 7.17 x 0.61 inches
Softcover, 176 pages, full color
In Japanese

Buy From Amazon.com | Amazon CA | Amazon UK

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