When I was growing up, I didn’t know how much animation I watched, and the idea was that animation was for kids. With the growth of time, I watched more animation, and gradually understood that animation is just a form of expression. It can present very children’s content, but also can express very adult stories. At the same time, in animation, people’s imagination can run freely, which gives the director more space for expression.
The Memory Trilogy by Katsuyo Octomom is undoubtedly one of the more “deep” animations. The technical means of animation allow him and his colleagues to combine imaginative animations with storylines and reveal more than entertaining themes at the same time. The three stories, some tragic, some ironic, or depressed, all express a kind of anxiety in general, which makes the animation stand out from the others.
“Memories of Her” is one of the more tragic stories, and it should be said that from the beginning it seems like nothing new. A junk collecting spacecraft receives a distress call, explores the vast abandoned ship, and finds itself in a bizarre and dangerous situation, which has been used a hundred times in American science fiction. And the idea that the machine in the film has consciousness, that memory is connected to reality, is not new. But it’s in a plot like this that the power of animation comes into full play, in which a former soprano actor sinks into memory to commemorate a lost love and build a holographic world in space. And those who enter this world are also lost, and are reminded of deep memories by machines that already have consciousness. This psychedelic feeling through the animation can let the director the most enjoyable release of creative inspiration, the solemn ruins of the environment to the elegant theater conversion, the astronaut into the beautiful fantasy, the dialogue with the fantasy, people and memory with the echo of Bell Canto soundtrack show a heavy, a heartache, a kind of sadness. At the end of the film, the astronaut becomes another relic of the actress’s memory, and in the ruins, lays her body, which has become a skeleton. The painful memory is so heartbreaking that it needs to be expanded beyond control and broken beyond control.
“The Slinkiest Weapon” can be seen as a satirical sketch in which a research institute staffer mistakenly takes a drug secretly researched for the government and becomes the source of a chemical weapon, dropping people everywhere in his path. And in order to bring the drug in accordance with the boss ordered back to Tokyo, he passed through the missile, tanks, fighter jets encircled “loyal” to carry out his mission. Tinged with dark humor, which is essentially a bitter laugh, this quirky tale is not only suffused with apocalyptic wariness about the negative effects of human technological progress, but also has a strong Japanese character, which is hard to shed as the only country ever to be attacked by such “apocalyptic” weapons as nuclear weapons. And “loyalty” is also the object of satire here. For a society, what is truly terrible is often not the most vicious person, but the unconscious involvement of some people with good nature. For example, the small staff of that research institute unwittingly became the producer of a social disaster, and at the same time gradually expanded it. The accompanying military action was easily resolved by a small staff, which further demonstrated that what was truly terrible was not a weapon, but a distorted value or concept. This story seems to be a side reflection of a nation that once carried out a collective crazy war of aggression and suffered the price collectively.
Of the three, my favorite is Cannon Street, a grand 1984 animation that is the shortest, most depressing and most chilling. The people in the film are already robots in form and consciousness, and their purpose is to build cannons and shells, and then use the cannons to fire the shells at their unknown “enemies.” The country in the film is the epitome of a militaristic country, and even the education of the children has been infiltrated. The mathematical theory explained in the math class is permeated with how to calculate the better fight the enemy, while the window of the children’s yearning is just a battery. At the end of the film, the painting of the child in the father’s hands fully reflects the result of education in this environment. The painting of the child often reflects their world view, which in the film is full of war and killing, and his dream is to grow up to be an officer, not just an artilleryman like his father. In the film, there is a shot looking out from the Street of Cannons, which looks desolate, and makes the street of Cannons appear lonely in the desert, which somewhat reflects the characteristics of the island nation of Japan, and it seems to indicate a color of reflection. The movie’s militaristic state is already depressing and even more depressing for the children, and these hopes for the future have been embedded early in the vast political fabric, which is deeply worrying.
“Memory Trilogy” is worthy of a classic Japanese animation, its classic is not its technical breakthrough, how wonderful the story, how twists and turns on the plot. The film can be called “author animation”. The directors use animation as a form to reflect deep thoughts on life, society, culture and politics. Although the tone of this animation is worried, it reflects the author’s respectful positive attitude
