Had director Satoshi Kon not died so ludicrously young (at the age of 46 to pancreatic cancer), leaving behind just four feature films and a handful of shorts and television episodes, he would no doubt have been hailed as one of the anime greats, up there with the likes of Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Ishii and Katsuhiro Otomo. He’s rightly revered by fans but less well known outside anime circles despite a small but flawless filmography, and that’s a wrong that deserves to be set right.

Millennium Actress, his second film as director, is his most personal project, a vast journey through Japanese post-war history and cinema, a love-letter to the country’s rich cinematic heritage and a sort-of companion piece to his debut, Perfect Blue (1997) – both films feature a media celebrity dealing, in part, with the pressures of success as reality and fantasy merge around them.

Disarmingly, the film seems to be starting out as a hard science fiction film before Kon performs one of the film’s many abrupt about faces – what we’re watching is a scene from a film featuring the now aged and reclusive Chiyoko Fujiwara (Miyoko Shoji voicing the aged Chiyoko, Mami Koyama playing her as a younger adult and Fumiko Orikasa as a teenager). With her old stamping grounds, the Ginei Studios, now out of business and the building itself being torn down, television interviewer and former Ginei employee Genya Tachibana (Shōzō Iizuka) and his cameraman Kyoji Ida (Masaya Onosaka) track down Chiyoko, the studio’s most popular star, for a career-spanning interview. Tachibana gives Chiyoko a key that she lost at the studio and it triggers a wave of memories of a mysterious artist and political dissident she encountered by chance as a teenager during the Sino-Japanese War and became obsessed with. Having helped him to escape military forces, he disappears from her life and she decides to become an actress in the hope that she will one day be famous enough to attract his attention and bring him back to her. As the years go by, Chiyoko does indeed achieve fame and popularity but the man never reappears and she ends up marrying a Ginei director, Junichi Ōtaki (Hirotaka Suzuoki). But Tachibana learns the terrible truth about the dissident’s fate, a truth he never reveals to Chiyoko who approaches the end of her life content that the search for her mysterious stranger was, in the end, more important to her than actually finding him.

Kon will repeatedly shift viewpoints and realities throughout the film to a startling but wholly compelling degree. Chiyoko’s memories – as unreliable as anyone else’s – are inextricably linked with her film career. An attack on a train she’s travelling on through Manchuria bleeds into a samurai film, which in turn give sway to a ghost story; a ninja film appears, appropriately enough, out of nowhere; and a giant monster rampages through the countryside. Anyone familiar with films like Kenji Misumi’s Zatôichi monogatari/The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) or Ishiro Honda’s Gojira/Godzilla (1954), or the films of Akira Kurosawa, Kaneto Shindo and Yasujiro Ozu will spot the many references – even to non-Japanese films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Millennium Actress can be enjoyed as a psychologically rich and thematically dense love story, albeit an unusual one, but it’s so much more than that. It’s as much about memories and their vulnerability to being warped and misinterpreted as anything else. Chiyoko’s journey through her memories mixes real events and the plots of her films, into both of which Tachibana and Ida are inserted, interacting with her pasts, both real and fictional. Kon would prove to be the master of this kind of reality bending anime – memories and perceptions are warped throughout Perfect Blue, Paprika (2006) largely takes place inside people’s dreams and unreliable memories are key to the story of his television series Paranoia Agent (2004).

There’s humour here too. Ida, the sardonic cameraman, wondering if he should get himself fired to escape the knotted tangle of Chiyoko’s memories, or wryly commentating on the increasingly hectic whirl of ideas and images (“this is too much” he cries), helps to ground us amid the film’s shifting kaleidoscope of realities. Then too there’s the wonderful moment when a samurai battle cuts back to the film’s present where Chiyoko and Tachibana are re-enacting scenes from the film on her sofa. In many ways, Ida is the target audience, a young man like Kon himself who was unfamiliar with much of his own country’s cinematic heritage, his eyes constantly being opened to things he previously knew little or nothing about.

Technically, the film is a marvel, every bit as stunning as any Studio Ghibli film. The sequence where Chiyoko takes a brief fast-forward through time, by rickshaw, horse-drawn carriage and bicycle, is outstanding and Kon offered it as his own favourite moment in the film. It’s rivalled by a remarkable montage after Chiyoko receives a letter from the artist where various pasts and realities blur into an exhilarating whirlwind of experiences both real and imagined as she races back to Hokkaido where they first met in the hope that he might be there. All of this is underscored by the gorgeous music of Susumu Hirasawa, a former member of progressive rock band Mandrake and electronic rock group P-Model, and a restless musical chameleon whose various projects have incorporated punk, synthpop and ambient. He’d been composing soundtracks for anime for many years and became Kon’s composed of choice, returning for Paranoia Agent and Paprika and he was due to work on the director’s final film, left incomplete at the time of his death.

Kon’s films are always challenging but always reward the effort they demand from the viewer. Millennium Actress is often bewildering, and to those with little interest in Japanese cinema a lot of it isn’t going to make any sense. But on a purely emotional level it’s hard to fault. Chiyoko’s love affair with a man she only met briefly and never really knew sounds absurd but in Kon’s hands it becomes an achingly poignant story of loss, devotion and obsession leading to a late in life realisation about what has really been important – on her death bed Chiyoko finally admits that her desire to see the artist again wasn’t really that important at all, that the search for the mysterious man was what gave her life its meaning (“what I really love is the pursuit of him” she realises). At the end, Tachibana laments that she was “pursuing the shadow of a person who was no longer there,” but she’s made peace with her decisions and it was that pursuit that gave her the rich and fulfilling life she enjoyed.

After Millennium Actress, Kon made the excellent Christmas set Tokyo Godfathers (2003), created the television series Paranoia Agent and released his final feature, Paprika, in 2006. His last completed work was Good Morning (2008), part of the Ani*Kuri15 (2007-1008) series of 1-minute long television stories. At the time of his death in August 2010 he was working on a new feature, Dreaming Machine, almost half of which had been completed. For years, the various companies involved in the film insisted that it was still in production and would one day be completed until eventually, in 2016 producer Masao Maruyama told the Akiba Souben website that “Dreaming Machine should be Kon’s movie, him and only him, not someone else’s.” It looks unlikely now that his final work will ever be seen.