Name(s): Magnetic Rose / Stink Bomb / Cannon Fodder / MEMORIES（メモリーズ)

Memories is a movie that’s fairly niche, or at least one that seems like it would be. I wonder if I would have watched it if not for the fact that Satoshi Kon was involved, a director I really respect. We barely got anything from him before his untimely death so I felt obligated to watch Memories. However, though I assumed he directed one of the three segments, I found he actually only wrote the screenplay for the first two segments. Normally, you might think I’d end up being disappointed from expecting something else, but instead, Memories was far better than anything I could have anticipated. To be frank, it’s the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in a good while.

Memories was my first anime compilation movie. It consists of three segments that are unrelated to one another, other than the fact that they’re all adaptations of Katsuhiro Otomo’s short manga stories. Despite the title, there’s no apparent theme or connection running between them, except that they could all loosely qualify as science-fiction. and yet, they oddly fit well together in a way that I can’t quite pinpoint. Before I continue talking about the movie as whole, I’m going to get into what each individual segment is about.

Magnetic Rose is Memories‘s first segment and is directed by Kōji Morimoto of Akira and The Animatrix fame. A space freighter known as the Corona is out on a standard junk-collecting job when the crew picks up a sudden distress signal. The distress signal is located in a dangerous area known for emitting a powerful magnetic field but the team is lured by the possibility of rich rewards and goes to investigate. The crew discovers a seemingly abandoned space station surrounded by several destroyed ships. Two members of the crew search inside and discover antiques from a mysterious woman’s past. Questions are answered with more mysteries as various strange phenomena occur that hint nothing about the space station is what it seems.

However, it’s no mystery why Magnetic Rose is widely regarded to easily be the greatest of the three Memories segments. The scene composition in Magnetic Rose is some of the best I’ve ever seen in anime. Whether you’re watching something live-action or animated the fact remains that either way you’re looking at a flat screen. Rarely does anything exist in either of these mediums that has managed to create an actual feeling of three-dimensional depth.

Taking cues from the masterwork of that achievement, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Morimoto manages to replicate the vastness and weightlessness of space into an animated format. I didn’t simply choose the 2001 comparison because they’re similar—Morimoto even adapts a classical/operatic score thanks to the work of Yoko Kanno. Just as it worked in 2001 the sweeping arrangements sync up with the slow dances in weightlessness, and the opera works well with the story’s rising tension.

Still, most of the segment takes place inside a space station with gravity, and we’re lucky that Morimoto nails the atmosphere there just as well. Though lit by electrical lighting the lighting of the scenes appears as if they’re lit by candlelight, lending a specific vibe that matches the space station’s sophisticated classical European decor.

The other half of why Magnetic Rose sucks you in so closely is that the pacing is positively perfect. About half of the movie takes place with the crew members simply exploring the space station and finding piece by piece what the space station is and what transpired there before them. Many anime would blow past this to get to the climax or make you wish it would, but due to the very inviting aura of the beautiful decorations and chilling air of the large abandoned rooms you feel completely at home and don’t mind taking your time looking around.

Magnetic Rose makes you feel as if you’re there with the crew members slowly exploring and taking in the sights. And that’s really the thing here. Most of Magnetic Rose is about exploring, and it’s not only the characters that are doing it. I found myself as intrigued by the mysteries as any of the crew members and was trying to slowly piece all the evidence together as the segment went on.

The story itself is well and good, having several surprises and a few clever red herrings, but it’s secondary to the atmosphere. The characters are simple personalities but easily understood, related to, and empathized with. The climax doesn’t arrive suddenly and instead approaches over time, which makes sense as the crew get closer to finding the foreboding distress signal. The revelations to the mysteries are not likely going to be anything you haven’t seen somewhere before, but the sense of scale thanks to the excellent direction job magnifies them to greater power and cements Magnetic Rose (and Memories at large) as a classic of animation.

Magnetic Rose is the most ambitious and emotionally affecting of the three tales in Memories, and is both a fantastic opener and something that’s simply too powerful to be likely topped by the proceeding segments. It’s also the only segment that has anything to do with the “theme” of memories.

Magnetic Rose is followed up by Stink Bomb, a black comedy about a pharmaceutical researcher, Nobuo Tanaka, who takes an experimental bioweapon pill mistakenly thinking it’s medicine that will cure his cold. Nobuo then spends the rest of the segment puzzled as he doesn’t understand everyone around him is dying due to a deadly gas he’s now secreting thanks to the bioweapon pill. Japan’s top government brass learns of this disaster and realizes Nobuo has to be stopped before he dooms the entire country. Soon Nobuo finds himself being chased by the entire Japanese military for reasons he doesn’t understand.

Though I find Stink Bomb‘s silly comedy to be a very refreshing comedown from the dramatic Magnetic Rose, it’s undoubtedly the weakest part of Memories. It’s nearly as long as Magnetic Rose, but the biggest problem with it is that it doesn’t really go anywhere. The whole concept is the entire, one gag. Nobuo is nervous and confused that everyone around him is dying, and everyone other than him is in a complete state of panic over the deadly gas. The government tries a method to subdue Nobuo, fails and panics, tries again, fails and panics, and tries again until the segment is eventually over. The absurdity builds, but it’s just pumping air into the same thing repeatedly.

After Magnetic Rose, you’d expect more from it the longer it goes on, but it just doesn’t happen. The big joke really isn’t that funny, actual plot developments pretty much cease after the government starts chasing Nobuo, and the latter half of the segment is dominated by Nobuo just running away from big explosions. Nobuo is also such a clueless moron that he quickly loses any warm sympathy he could’ve gotten by being a relatable everyman down on his luck, and he’s the reason why a ton of people die. It doesn’t help that this is the blandest of the three segments not only conceptually, but in animation and art style as well. There’s really nothing to say about those categories since nothing sets them apart.

Really, Stink Bomb isn’t bad. Again, I liked the change in tone from Magnetic Rose, and the feeling of a sudden cool breeze hitting my face when it started felt good enough to carry me through about 70% of the story, and I enjoyed it well enough for that alone. It just needed to be funnier—or shorter—or both.

The music is interesting, being a mix of blaring jazz and funky bass that matches the chaos, though only the main theme is something you’ll really remember. Hell, it’s probably the best thing to come from Stink Bomb. Good work, Jun Miyake. Stink Bomb is directed by Tensai Okamura, who has worked on too many popular anime to list here, but Stink Bomb was his debut as an independent director, and perhaps it shows.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Cannon Fodder is the finale and… wow. Cannon Fodder has some of the most impressive art and animation I have ever seen, and it undoubtedly puts the previous sections to shame by comparison. I’m not even sure how to describe the art style of Cannon Fodder, but no one would ever assume it was Japanese-made just by looking at it.

Every single frame of this segment is packed with too many details to comprehend in a glance, especially since the perspective is always on the move, rotating around characters and scenes to create the optical illusion of a single-take shot where the next scene of Cannon Fodder is always hidden behind the one before it. Cannon Fodder is by all respects absolutely dazzling to look at, and I get shivers thinking about how fluidly it was all done, and how it’s so ignored in comparison to Magnetic Rose.

Cannon Fodder centers around a young boy and his family who live in a sheltered, militaristic city. Dominated by neutral colors other than the occasional sharp red, Cannon Fodder‘s world design is just as detailed as the art and employs several steampunk elements. There’s a bleak and dystopian feel that any viewer will recognize, but most of the city’s citizens don’t seem to mind it at all. They’re raised from birth to believe that fighting in the military is the greatest honor someone could have, and the young boy is very happy and enamored with the endless soldiers and gigantic cannons.

Indeed, we never even see any culture of the city that isn’t related to the military, and it defines them completely. However, a small number of the citizens show they aren’t completely satisfied with the current system, and the young boy’s father seems to be one of them, as he becomes increasingly more disillusioned and depressed over him and his son’s future.

Sadly, Cannon Fodder is mostly style. It’s by far the shortest of the three segments at only 20 minutes, which is unfortunate, considering Stink Bomb received double the length. It’s pretty much all world-building, and a fairly obvious satire of any real-world militaristic society, but its social commentary is effective, regardless. The segment is a look into just one family’s daily life in this city, and it’s haunting that there’s no satisfying closure, as most of its society remains blissfully unaware of any life outside of war and its industry.

When watching an anime movie at home, the theatrical feeling is often lost, and you simply feel like you’re just watching a long anime. With Memories, I got that theatrical feeling back, and I was wholly sucked into it. It was as if it was a special, private showing just for me, and there was nothing else around me as it was running. I have trouble explaining why, but Memories was very special to me, and it’s an animated movie I’d recommend to anyone. It was an event, and it made my night.