Indian startup Jeh Aerospace founders Vishal Sanghavi and Venkatesh Mudragalla have had a front row seat to the commercial aircraft sector and its growing production bottleneck.
The two former Tata Group executives spent close to two decades in different positions at the company and worked on projects that included participation from global aerospace companies, including Boeing, Sikorsky, and Lockheed Martin.
Now, armed with $11 million in Series A funding, the pair are working to ease global supply chain bottlenecks by scaling the production of metallic components for aero engines and aerostructures, which it then sells to U.S.-based Tier 1 suppliers that work with commercial aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus and Boeing.
And they plan to help India become a destination for aerospace component manufacturing in the process.
“At Tatas, we unlocked India’s potential for these large OEMs, Boeing, Airbus, Sikorsky, and GE [General Electric], but we wanted Jeh Aerospace to unlock India’s potential for the large Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers in the supply chain,” said Sanghavi, who is also CEO at Jeh.
Jeh Aerospace, which is headquartered in Atlanta to better access its U.S. customer base, has a 60,000-square-foot software-based, precision manufacturing facility is in the Southern Indian city of Hyderabad. The three-year-old startup has combined precision machinery, robotics, and IoT devices to slash product introduction lead times from the industry’s traditional 15-week timeline to 15 days.
Jeh Aerospace’s software-defined manufacturing approach helps bring predictability and dynamic scheduling to allow offering a consistent supply to customers with no compromises on quality, Sanghavi said.
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And it seems VCs and strategic investors are interested in Jeh Aerospace’s pitch.
The Series A round was led by Elevation Capital, with participation from General Catalyst. With the infusion of the new capital, Jeh Aerospace has raised about $15 million in total from institutional venture capital firms. The VC fresh funding comes less than a month after the startup received an undisclosed strategic investment from IndiGo Ventures, a corporate venture capital arm of Indian carrier IndiGo.
Ashray Iyengar, principal at Elevation Capital, said the company “built a truly differentiated approach to aerospace manufacturing.”
Aircraft production bottleneck
Global air traffic demand rose 10.4% year-over-year in 2024, surpassing 2019 levels by 3.8%, per the International Air Transport Association data released earlier this year.
The rebound has spurred airlines to expand fleets, pushing up orders even as the industry grapples with talent and production bottlenecks, as Deloitte notes in a recent report. Tier 1 suppliers are facing extended lead times as the commercial aircraft backlog reaches a record nearly 15,700 units, according to McKinsey.
Jeh Aerospace’s founders believe using technology to scale production of metallic components for aero engines and aerostructures will unplug that bottleneck. That premise has shaped how Sanghavi, the former chief operating officer at Tata Boeing Aerospace, and Mudragalla have built its 100-person workforce, team of advisers, and business model.
Instead of working directly with OEMs like Airbus and Boeing, which makes makes 30% of commercial aircraft, Jeh Aerospace deliberately decided to tap Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers, Sanghavi told TechCrunch, adding this group makes 60% to 70% of aircraft.
The startup currently has half a dozen paying customers, including Vermont-based GS Precision and Ohio-headquartered RH Aero. Sanghavi said each of these customers is a “high dollar, high ARR customer,” and they have the potential to become large accounts in the next one to two years.
“What we believe is that to work with lesser, but better customers, not to have a transactional relationship, but a far deeper and meaningful relationship. So, we are also very, very focused on not having too many customers,” he said. “The business doesn’t need too many customers because you can really scale with few customers very fast and very quickly.”
The company has also assembled an advisory team with deep ties to commercial aircraft OEMS. The startup counts former Boeing India President Pratyush (Prat) Kumar and former Airbus India CEO and Managing Director Dwaraka Srinivasan among its early advisors and backers.
Jeh Aerospace has made notable manufacturing and financial progress in its short life.
Since its $2.75 million seed round in January last year, Jeh Aerospace says it has delivered more than 100,000 flight-critical components and tools on time. The startup has also established a machine capacity exceeding 250,000 hours annually.
In the last financial year, the startup reached $6 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) and achieved profitability after taxes. Sanghavi told TechCrunch that it projects a 3x to 4x increase in its ARR this year and also boasts an order book worth $100 million.
The company plans to use the new $11 million in capital to scale its manufacturing and inspection capabilities by investing in next-generation digital production technologies, Sanghavi said.
The Jeh Aerospace co-founders see an opportunity to bring more local manufacturing to India and trengthen the country’s position on the global aerospace map, much like its recent emergence as a hub for iPhone production.
India already plays a growing role in aerospace manufacturing, with Airbus sourcing $1.4 billion worth of components annually from the country and targeting $2 billion by 2030. Boeing, for its part, is aiming for a $1.3 billion annual spend and announced its plans to invest $200 million in a new engineering and technology center in Bengaluru in 2023. Still, the South Asian nation has yet to achieve large-scale success in aerospace component manufacturing — a gap companies like Jeh Aerospace are hoping to fill.
Although few Indian startups operate in aerospace component manufacturing, the sector includes players like JJG Aero, which appears to be a peer to Jeh Aerospace based on industry positioning. Sanghavi declined to comment specifically on JJG and noted that his startup sees its primary competition among U.S.-based tier-2 suppliers.
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#Jeh #Aerospace #nets #11M #scale #commercial #aircraft #supply #chain #India #TechCrunch
![‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/Millennium-Actress.jpg "‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon")
![‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon](https://i3.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/Millennium-Actress.jpg?ssl=1 "‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon")
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