Memories: The Otomo-Produced Sci-Fi Triptych

Anthology films are almost always a bargain: you accept one weak segment for one great one. Memories, released in 1995 under Katsuhiro Otomo’s supervision, breaks the arrangement by making the arithmetic irrelevant. Its three shorts share a producer, a source in Otomo’s own manga, and essentially nothing else — a haunted-house story in deep space, a slapstick catastrophe on a bicycle, and a wordless piece of totalitarian world-building. Each is directed by a different person in a different register. The first of them is among the best forty minutes animation has produced, and the other two are strong enough that nobody argues about which one you skip.

Magnetic Rose

A deep-space salvage crew picks up a distress signal from a derelict in a debris field and goes aboard, because that is the job and because the wreck is full of salvage. Inside they find an opera singer’s house — corridors, chandeliers, a ballroom, roses, and the accumulated furniture of a career — assembled somehow inside a hulk in vacuum. Two of the crew go in. The ship’s interior begins to give each of them what they want.

Koji Morimoto directed. Satoshi Kon wrote the screenplay, several years before his own features, and the segment is unmistakably his: an environment built from a personality, a protagonist losing the ability to distinguish the constructed image from the room he is standing in, and a structure that keeps promising a haunting and delivering something sadder. Yoko Kanno scored it, weaving Puccini through the piece so that a woman’s recorded voice becomes the thing doing the haunting.

The craft is in the production design. The house is drawn with an obsessive, catalogue-accurate density — the specific weight of the drapes, the correct clutter of a dressing table, a chandelier articulated well enough to be worth looking at — and Morimoto stages it in near-total silence, so that the crew’s suit radio chatter is the only reminder that any of this is impossible. What makes the segment work is the collision of surfaces: the immaculate house and the two grubby, sweating, thoroughly unromantic working men inside it, who talk like salvage contractors because that is what they are. Space horror is usually built from industrial ugliness. This one is built from beauty, and it is far worse.

Kanno’s contribution deserves separating out, because it is doing something more devious than scoring. Rather than write a theme and lay it over the images, she lets the opera do the haunting from inside the story: the music is diegetic for much of the segment, a recording playing in a room that should not exist, so the audience and the salvage crew are hearing the same sound for the same reason. When the score does step outside the wreck and become conventional film music, the boundary is impossible to locate. The technique makes the house’s seduction land on the viewer directly, and it is a trick Kanno would spend the next decade refining.

The collector’s note: the real ancestor here is not another space film. It is the haunted-house tradition where the house is a person’s mind and the intruder is offered what they most want — the same engine that runs Solaris, which Kon and Morimoto plainly knew inside out. The debt is honourable and the result stands on its own.

Stink Bomb

Nobuo Tanaka, a junior employee at a pharmaceutical research facility, has a cold. He takes a pill from a cabinet in the lab. It is not cold medicine.

Tensai Okamura directs Otomo’s script as pure escalating farce. Tanaka wakes up to a building full of dead colleagues, receives a phone call telling him to bring the experimental compound’s data to Tokyo, and sets off on his scooter with the utmost professional diligence. Everyone he passes dies. He does not notice. The Self-Defense Forces engage him; the Americans get involved; the countryside fills with troops and body bags and specialist units in sealed suits, and Tanaka pedals on towards head office with his documents, wounded that his employers seem cross with him.

The joke is the same one Roujin Z was making four years earlier, sharpened to a point: a catastrophe in which nobody misbehaves. Tanaka is a model employee. The soldiers follow their orders. The lab followed its protocols. The film’s body count is a direct product of everyone doing exactly what they are supposed to, and Okamura keeps the comedy running by never letting Tanaka acquire the information that would make him stop. It is a segment about obedience as a chemical agent, and it is genuinely very funny — the sight of a man politely apologising to a firing line has stayed with a lot of people.

Where it stumbles is length. The gag is complete about two-thirds of the way through, and the escalation past that point adds hardware without adding an idea.

Cannon Fodder

Otomo directs this one himself, and it looks like nothing else in his filmography.

A city is a cannon. Every building is a gun emplacement or infrastructure for a gun emplacement; every citizen’s work is loading, aiming, calculating or celebrating. A boy goes to school and learns the mathematics of artillery. His father goes to his shift and loads a shell. Somewhere out there is an enemy. Nobody has seen it. The day ends. The next day will be the same.

The segment is staged to look like one continuous take — the camera drifting through the city, floor to floor, street to sky, in an unbroken movement that pointedly refuses the relief of a cut. The design is sooty, Eastern European, deliberately anachronistic, closer to a 1930s propaganda poster than to any science fiction; the colour is drained to rust and grey. It is a demanding twenty minutes that plays as a mood piece and is doing serious work.

The choice worth naming is the refusal to cut, because it is what turns a satire into an experience of tedium. A montage of a militarised society would let you observe the horror from outside. Otomo’s drift makes you serve a shift. By the time the boy is doing his homework you have been inside the war economy long enough to feel its rhythm, and its rhythm is the thing being satirised — not violence, which nobody in the city ever witnesses, but routine.

Why anthologies keep working

The three segments have almost nothing in common on the surface, and the film is stronger for it. A themed anthology with a wraparound narrator asks each part to serve a whole; Memories asks nothing of the sort and simply puts three complete objects in a row. The unity is in the sensibility: each short is about a person trapped inside a system that is functioning perfectly — a memory palace, a corporation, a state — and none of them says so out loud.

It also functions as a showcase in the way the best anthologies do. Morimoto, Okamura and Otomo were operating at the top of an industry that had money, talent and no obligation to a franchise, and the film is a snapshot of what that talent could do when handed forty minutes and left alone. The tradition it belongs to is set out in the anthology film and why it keeps coming back, and Memories is one of the strongest arguments in its favour: an animated portmanteau with no dud.

The companion piece from the same scene is Robot Carnival, the other great Japanese animated anthology of the era, which shares the model — several directors, one loose theme, no wraparound doing the thinking for you.

The verdict, argued

The case against is structural. “Magnetic Rose” is so far ahead of what follows it that the film’s shape is wrong: it front-loads its masterpiece and then asks you to enjoy a farce and a mood piece in its shadow. “Stink Bomb” outstays its idea. “Cannon Fodder” will lose a portion of any audience within five minutes and does not care. As a ninety-minute experience it descends rather than builds.

The case for is that a film containing “Magnetic Rose” does not need to be well-shaped. That segment is the finest thing Satoshi Kon wrote before he directed, one of the great pieces of animated production design, and a horror story that earns an emotional ending nobody sees coming. The other two are the work of serious people with real ideas about how a society breaks. Watch it in one sitting, then watch the first segment again on its own; it improves considerably when nothing is scheduled to follow it.

Spoilers below

“Magnetic Rose” turns on the fact that the house is being maintained.

Eva Friedel, the opera singer whose life fills the derelict, is long dead, and what remains is a system built to preserve her memories — an apparatus running her past on a loop, dressing the wreck in her house, replaying the moment her career and her love ended. When Heintz enters, it stops replaying her and starts building for him: it finds his dead daughter and gives her back to him, complete, in a corridor of his own home. The trap is bespoke.

Kon’s cruelty is that the offer is sincere. The system is not malevolent; it is doing exactly what it was made to do, which is to keep a person inside the best thing that ever happened to them. Heintz’s colleague dies inside a fantasy of his own; Heintz survives only because his memory is a wound rather than a pleasure, and he can tell the difference between his daughter and a picture of her — barely, and at enormous cost.

“Stink Bomb” ends with Tanaka reaching the outskirts of Tokyo, still holding his documents, still baffled by the reception, and the state finally stopping him by the only means it has left. The compound’s actual purpose is disclosed almost as an afterthought, and the film’s last laugh is administrative: a man asks whether the sample survived. The dead are a line item.

“Cannon Fodder” has no ending because it has no plot. The boy lies in bed and imagines himself firing the great cannon, and the film simply stops on the fact that he wants to. That is Otomo’s whole argument, delivered in one image and no dialogue: the enemy does not need to exist and the war does not need to be won, because a child has already learned to dream about the loading. It is the coldest twenty minutes in the film and the one that gets quoted decades later.

Go next to Robot Carnival for the other essential anime anthology, and to Roujin Z for Otomo’s other joke about a catastrophe caused by people following instructions.