"Actor: Masaaki Ôkura"

• Perfect Blue - Standard Edition | Blu Ray | (02/02/2015) from £15.85   |  Saving you £2.14 (13.50%)   |  RRP £17.99

  One of the most ambitious animated films to come out of Japan (or anywhere, for that matter), Perfect Blue is an adult psycho-thriller that uses the freedom of the animated image to create the subjective reality of a young actress haunted by the ghost of her past identity. Mima is a singer who leaves her teeny-bop trio to become an actress in a violent television series, a career move that angers her fans, who prefer to see her as the pert, squeaky-clean pop idol. Plagued by self-doubt and tormented by humiliating compromises, she begins to be stalked, in her waking and sleeping moments, by an accusing alter ego who claims to be "the real Mima", until she collapses into madness as her co-workers are brutally slain around her. Director Satoshi Kon, adapting the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, shows us the world from her schizophrenic perspective: days blur, dreams cross over into the waking world, the TV show blends into her real life, until her life merges with her part and she can't separate the ghosts from the real-life stalkers. Though the pat ending sweeps the psychosis and anxiety away with nary an emotional scar, it remains a smart, stylish thriller and one of the most intelligent and compelling uses of animation in recent years. Though tame by the extreme standards of "adult anime", there is nudity and a few sexually provocative scenes, and the animation is detailed and stylised (if somewhat stiff and jerky by Disney standards). --Sean Axmaker

• My Actress/Perfect Blue | DVD | (01/08/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Millennium Actress has the stylistic sophistication of Perfect Blue with the empathy warmth and truth of Spirited Away. A gorgeous theatrical animation from the makers of anime classic Perfect Blue and last years' adorable Tokyo Godfathers. Millennium Actress begins as a TV crew track down 70 something screen goddess Chiyoko Fujiwara. Chiyoko begins to tell her life story at which point she literally steps into the past dragging the confused crew into her memories - one moment they're discussing dramatic art the next dodging bullets in the midst of a movie as the boundaries between film memory fact and fiction become a breathless blur. Perfect Blue: Mima was a pop idol worshiped by the masses until fashion dictated otherwise. In order to salvage her ailing career she is advised to drop music and pursue acting. A soap opera role is offered but Mima's character is less clean cut than desired. Regardless she agrees and events take a turn for the worse. She begins to feel reality slip slowly that her life is not her own. She discovers [imagines] her identical twin a mirror image that hasn't given up singing. Internet sites appear describing every intimate detail of her life and a mysterious figure stalks her from the shadows. Her friends and associates are threatened [and killed] as Mima descends into a dangerous world of paranoid delusion. She fears for her life and must unravel fact from fiction in order to stay alive.