Memories

While many know of Katsuhiro Otomo for his work on Akira, both the manga and anime film, he also has a great many other works under his belt. One of which is the seminal 1995 film compilation Memories.

Otomo has an interesting history of working on anime anthology films, from Robot Carnival to Neo Tokyo and more recently with Short Peace. However, Memories was very much his project in an overall sense and, like his other work, originated in a manga format.

Specifically, the original manga compilation, also called Memories, was something of a formative manga work for me. While the movie wouldn’t adapt the whole manga anthology, it was split across three segments; Magnetic Rose, Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder.

It was also something I couldn’t wait to see animated. Not least because my favorite story in the manga compilation, that of Magnetic Rose, was getting its own mini-film.

Magnetic Rose was a great science-fiction story based around space-based salvage and debris collectors answering a strange SOS call in a heavily magnetic part of space. The center of which was a giant rose-like structure built out of debris. It turns out that this magnetic rose had more to it than it first appeared and that a famous opera singer was potentially the cause of it all.

The animated adaptation is broadly the same as the manga story and was directed by Koji Morimoto with a script by Satoshi Kon, the latter being a frequent collaborator with Otomo. It also utilized the mecha design talents of the perpetually underrated Takashi Watabe.

However, what made me adore this adaptation of Magnetic Rose to such a degree, apart from its story and wondrous animation, was its musical score by Yoko Kanno. Utilizing parts of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, it also riffed on the then somewhat new trend of using saxophones with renaissance-esque choruses. The latter being something that had come to the fore in 1994 with Jan Garbarek’s Officium album, which was and still is a very clear influence here.

Finishing up the three segments was Otomo’s own film, Cannon Fodder and while it is arguably the strangest of the three it was also the most important in some ways. With a story built around a city state built for war and bristling with artillery, our viewpoint is of a little boy whose father helps load the cannons.

For me, much of Otomo’s work outside of Akira has always captured my imagination far more, despite being nowhere near as successful. However, Memories was a fascinating exception to that, as it was a remarkably solid anthology that brought some of Otomo’s other manga to life as well as introduced new stories.