Memories

This anthology project by Katsuhiro Ōtomo (director of worldwide anime breakthrough hit Akira, 1988) is based on three of his manga and assembles a host of ’90s talent. Highlight Magnetic Rose is directed by Kōji Morimoto (co-founder of Studio 4°C and animation director of Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game, 2004), with a script by Satoshi Kon (director of Paprika, 2006) and a remarkable score by Yoko Kanno, who transposed Puccini’s Madame Butterfly to the space age.

This music plays an important role in the narrative, when four space garbage collectors investigate an emergency signal leading them to a traumatised opera diva, who has locked herself into her holographic memories which – as in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) – become hallucinatory nightmares for our helpful crew.

Most striking about the much more light-hearted Stink Bomb by studio Madhouse, about a none-too-bright laboratory assistant who, by randomly mixing medicines, unwittingly turns himself into a chemical weapon, is its origin as a true story (look for ‘Gloria Ramirez’). Directed by Tensai Okamura (known for series such as Wolf’s Rain, 2003), with a script by Ōtomo himself.

Final short Cannon Fodder, also by Studio 4°C and directed and scripted by Ōtomo, is notably designed as an almost continuous single take. Which provides a sense of space to the steampunk animation’s European-looking world, which revolves entirely around the firing of huge cannons at an enemy who may or may not exist.

And – the most important common thread of this varied triptych – our protagonist is once again a simple worker who is being subjected to the machinations of a heavily armed power.