Best known for landmark cyberpunk anime Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo crafted strange and terrifying visions of a world that has not yet come, imagining technology that surpassed that of today, but in much pessimistic light compared to that of the genre. Three of his manga short stories are depicted in Memories, with Otomo partnering with Kōji Morimoto and Tensai Okamura to direct each segment, and with Satoshi Kon in writing, just before Kon’s own iconic surrealist films. Kon-written Magnetic Rose has been universally acknowledged as the best of them, being much more emotionally poignant, but the other two does have its charms, as Stink Bomb takes a relatively silly premise to its fairly logical, but scary conclusion, and Cannon Fodder takes the beauty of Otomo’s art into such a hollow and ugly world. All three deliver terrifying omens of death through technology used against the everyday man, whether by accident or design.
Three back-to-back anime films by three different directors make up this sci-fi trilogy three years in the making.
From the mind of Katsuhiro Otomo comes three sci-fi shorts– engineers on a spacecraft discover a haunted space station in “Magnetic Rose”, a lab worker transforms into a killing machine in “Stink Bomb”, and father and son fight for their lives in a paranoid city in “Cannon Fodder”.
Magnetic Rose. Sorry to Otomo, who wrote the screenplays of both Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder. I’m a bit biased due to me being introduced first to Satoshi Kon before Otomo, but there was something pre-Satoshi Kon already present in Magnetic Rose, with the deadly blurring of memory and reality due to grief, rejection, and love, and the short primarily drawn to the female opera singer, so you can really tell how much of an impact Otomo had on Kon.
When four animators come together to maximize their joint slay… We just have to watch.
Berlin
1 nomination
