Memories Review

Katsuhiro Otomo's anthology adapts three of his manga short stories, and the first of them is one of the best things anime has produced. In Magnetic Rose, written by Satoshi Kon and directed by Kōji Morimoto, a salvage crew answers a distress signal from a derelict space station and finds the preserved world of Eva Friedel, an opera diva who vanished after her fiancé's murder. The station is haunted by her memories, the crew start seeing their own, and Yoko Kanno's score, built on Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Tosca, makes the whole thing play as grand opera. Kon's later films start here.

Stink Bomb is a black comedy: a lab technician with the flu swallows an experimental pill, becomes a walking chemical weapon and heads for Tokyo while the army fails to stop him. Cannon Fodder, which Otomo wrote and directed himself, follows a day in a walled city whose whole economy is firing enormous cannons at an enemy no one has ever seen, animated as one long take. The three are uneven, and critics have always ranked Magnetic Rose first, but together they show how far the medium could reach in 1995.