Review of Memories

Memories is an anthology film consisting in three short films: Magnetic Rose, Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder. These short films are unrelated so I will review them separately. Magnetic Rose is set in the future, where a spaceship of garbage collectors receives an SOS from an unidentified ship. We follow two members of the crew as they investigate the ship. The animation is extremely detailed and very beautiful, its quality and its art-style are comparable to that of the anime movie Ghost in the Shell. The background music is good, and consists mostly of opera and classical music. In this short film, the atmosphere is oppressiveand mysterious. The crew members discover the holographic memories of the owner of the ship, and face a computer that has her memories.

Stink Bomb is set in modern day Japan. A chemical researcher takes a medicine to get rid of his cold, but it turns out the medicine he took was a new type of chemical weapon, and everybody around him suddenly starts dying. In this short film, too, the animation quality is that of a movie. The art-style (the character designs in particular) is similar to the one in AKIRA – they were made by the same person so that’s not surprising. The background music is also pretty good. This short film is much more comical than the other two, the protagonist being a complete imbecile who doesn’t seem to understand that he is killing everyone, while the JSDF, the US army and the government are struggling to stop him from eradicating Tokyo. So there’s a comical distance between the army and the government doing everything they can to stop him, sending war helicopters, missiles, tanks and bombers to save Japan, and the protagonist being stupid and complaining about being hungry.

Cannon Fodder, the shortest film, is set in some sort of steampunk totalitarian dystopia, in a WW1-looking city where every building has a cannon on top of it, and where the whole of society is committed to fight an unknown enemy by firing cannons at them. The art-style is very original and completely different from the two other short films, looking more like a western cartoon than a Japanese anime, and being ugly on purpose. In this short film, too, the animation is very good, the backgrounds are well drawn and very detailed. The quality of the background music varies, it is sometimes good, sometimes bad. This film being pretty short (less than 25 minutes), there isn’t much time for character development, and we are only shown a bit of the daily lives of the characters. There’s also no plot, but it compensates with having an interesting universe.

In conclusion, these three short films are a very good watch, but the main problem is that they are completely unrelated as they have no common theme, and are way too short to leave an impact on the viewer. Despite this, it’s still an interesting experience, so I would recommend watching the anthology.

SUB-SCORE EXPLANATION:

Animation: movie quality; great art-style; very detailed backgrounds; an original art-style in the third film→ 10/10

Sound: good BGM most of the time; good VA; good sound effects → 8/10

Story: good plot in the first film; nice comedy in the second film; interesting universe in the third film → 7/10

Characters: only in the first film are the characters developed; the second film has a pretty comical protagonist → 6/10

Enjoyment: I enjoyed it a lot; high sentimental value; high re-watch value→ 8/10

Overall: 8/10