The Other and Its Representation in Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers

Abstract

This paper examines Satoshi Kon’s animated films Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, focusing on their representations of “the Other,” understood in Levinasian terms as l’Autre. Millennium Actress, which tells the story of Chiyoko, who pursues her elusive “Kagi no Kimi” throughout her life, exemplifies Levinas’s notion of totality (totalité), in which the Other is reduced to the Same (le Même) and absorbed into a self-enclosed narrative. By contrast, Tokyo Godfathers dramatizes an encounter with radical alterity (l’Autre): the abandoned infant found by three homeless protagonists functions as Levinas’s face (visage), demanding unconditional responsibility. Through this encounter, the characters undergo ethical transformation. Taken together, Millennium Actress represents the closed world of self-love, while Tokyo Godfathers gestures toward an ethically open relation with the Other. Kon’s films, thus, illuminate contrasting modes of ethics in contemporary society, suggesting that these films can be read as responses to both the instability and the possibility of ethics in modern life.