#memorizu

Tonight’s movie was Memories, an anthology anime broken up into three stories. The first story was Magnetic Rose, in which a crew of scrappers in space get a distress call that consists on opera. Investigating they end up sending two crew members into a spaceship with a curiously palatial interior. Something within the place soon has the men tangled into the memories of the opera singer that lived there. The magnetic pull of the space station is no stronger than the pull of memories. It’s a beautifully animated ghost story in space, even if the weirdness is not necessarily supernatural in origin. The memories dredged up from one of the men lends this one an emotional weight. The second story was Stink Bomb. A worker in a lab decides to treat his bad cold with a drug off his boss’ desk. This proves to be a huge mistake as it isn’t what he thinks. As he naps a terrible smell fills the air, killing everyone. Oblivious to his connection to the horror he races to take the data and samples to the company heads in Tokoyo, a deadly cloud following in his wake. This one is a dark and energetic comedy. The final story is Cannon Fodder. It follows a day in the life of a family in a war driven city studded with giant cannons.  The father loads cannons, the mother works in a munitions factory, and the little boy goes to school to learn to operate the cannons. Despite the setting and the never named enemy they live life like any family anywhere. It’s the most facinating segment, pushing the designs and animation in less conventional directions than the others. Warfare as normalcy, where causes and enemies matter much less than the job and fitting into your place in society. The boy asks who they are fighting and he is told he will understand when he is older. He will. He will know it doesn’t matter.  It’s a wonderful film, and it baffles me it took so long to watch the DVD!