Millennium Actress: Tracks

Chiyoko's entire journey is a demonstration of tanha, the thirst that Buddhism names as the engine of suffering. She does not want the man. She wants the wanting. The moment of contact would end the only thing that has organized her existence, so contact is endlessly deferred across decades and film genres. Kon builds this deferral into the grammar of the animation itself: she runs, and the setting changes beneath her feet, and the object stays at the horizon.

Tracks shows you the machine that manufactures this deferral. Watch the animators drawing frame after frame of a woman running toward something she will never reach. Each drawing is one cel closer to a finished film that, once released, will no longer be theirs to make. The documentary catches the artist in the same structure as his character. The studio is a monastery of pursuit. The teaching lands hardest in the meta-frame: the crew filming the crew are also chasing, also deferring, also alive only inside the running. Kundun's Dalai Lama would recognize this room. Everyone in it is grasping, and the grasping is beautiful, and the grasping is the wound.

Animation is the most literal alchemy in cinema. A still image, inert lead, is drawn twenty-four times a second until it appears to breathe. The animator's desk is the alembic. The prima materia is a blank cel; the gold is the illusion of a living woman running across a burning castle. Tracks documents this transmutation without dressing it up, and in doing so it shows the cost the finished film hides: the transformation of dead matter into living image is paid for in the hours of the people bent over the vessel.

Millennium Actress ends with Chiyoko admitting the chase was the point. The alchemical reading of Tracks is that the studio already knew this. They confused the vessel with the beloved and called it a career. The opus was never the film. The opus was the transmutation, repeated daily, of the artists themselves.