never seeing the man again, she realized that the search for him was what she loved most. Cast Production Millennium Actress is the second film directed by Satoshi Kon and his first original work, after the highly acclaimed Perfect Blue. It was planned by Masao Maruyama and produced by Taro Maki. Following the release of Perfect Blue, Kon considered adapting the Yasutaka Tsutsui novel Paprika (1993) into his next film. However, these plans were stalled when the distribution company for Perfect Blue, Rex Entertainment, went bankrupt. The project for Millennium Actress came from the words "Let's make a movie that looks like a trompe l'oeil" by Taro Maki, who decided to produce Kon's film because he thought his previous work was amazing. The script writing began with a sentence that Kon came up with: "An old woman who was once touted as a great actress is supposed to be recounting her life story, but her memories get confused and the various roles she played in the past begin to blend into it, creating a tumultuous story." The structure of the story was decided at the rough plot stage when Kon fleshed out this sentence, and the last scene remained intact in the finished film. He then worked with the scenario writer, Sadayuki Murai, and the producer to develop the episodes and detailed character settings to be included in the plot. Unlike the previous film, which he was hired to direct, this one was his original project, so he was able to express his own opinions, and decided to put more emphasis on the sound, especially the music, and asked Susumu Hirasawa, who had been adored for a long time, to compose the music. There were about 250 staff members in total, and the production period was about two years. The 20 or so main staff members were almost the same as in the previous work, with only the animation director changing. In the previous work, the character design was done by Hisashi Eguchi and the animation director by Hideki Hamasu, but in this work, both were done by Takeshi Honda. The reason for this is that the animation director is a very important and burdensome position, and the animators who have the skills and abilities that Kon would like to work with are usually those prefer to draw key frames rather than the animation director, making it difficult to ask