Suddenly, I saw a promotional poster for the movie, listing the four directors of the "Memories Trilogy" production lineup: Katsuhiro Otomo, Koji Morimoto, Okamura Tensai, and Imatoshi.
The first to change the history of Japanese animation, "Akira", and the last "Millennium Actress" who created animation with a cinematic mindset, should not be said more; Koji Morimoto, founder of STUDIO 4°C, and Okamura Tensai, who later collaborated with BONES Bone Society on "The Black Contractor", are also well-known animation supervisors in the industry.
But when it comes to MEMORIES, I can't help but say that there is one person in this work who can't erase its excellent character even if he doesn't mention his name: Yoko Kanno (菅野よう子), who is in charge of the soundtrack.
Although "MEMORIES" is a collection of animated films, the three chapters "Her Memories", "The Stinkiest Weapon", and "Cannon Street" almost only have the first story to hold the title of this animation.
Moreover, compared with the satirical comedy elements of "The Stinkiest Weapon" or the animation technology of the strong experimental nature of "Cannon Street", "Her Memories", which is the first chapter of the opening chapter, can indeed be felt that this is a key project with all its strength.
Who is "she" in "Her Memories"? Italian opera celebrities seal their memories in the spaceship, and two astronauts who recycle abandoned ships enter and activate "Her Memories".
Accompanied by Puccini's Madame Butterfly, the panoramic projection embodies her glorious past: eternal, fragile, beautiful, worn out, nostalgic, and frightening.
In Imatoshi's script, memories are a conspiracy to wait for others to step into a trap, unlike Marvel's "Wonder and Illusion" that turned "self-drowning" into a hero's growth process many years later, "Her Memories" is a deep sea that constantly pulls drowning people to the bottom and becomes eternal with her.
Yoko Kanno's cleverness lies in the fact that she has pushed this "Her Memories", which resembles "Butterfly Dream" (Hitchcock version, not the Netflix version), through high-pitched opera sounds and classical strings, stacking emotions like a small fire, pushing the climax to the final collapse, pushing the overwhelming "love" in Imatoshi's script to the extreme, shaping into a glass flower that blooms in brilliant space.
Yoko Kanno understands the ghostly suspense, knows how to sink into sweetness, knows how to brutally collapse, and accurately uses the soundtrack to refine the sadness of this sci-fi short story, reminiscent of Yoko Kanno's soundtrack masterpiece three years later - "Interstellar Cowboy".
She and her band "Seatbelts", combining jazz and blues folk songs such as Techno and other musical elements, have made the soundtrack of this anime the eternal number one for many anime fans (the good news is that the live-action album version of the soundtrack at the end of this year is still Yoko Sugano's palm cooking).
But speaking of this, there is an association that the "Star Cowboy" that sunrise society acclaimed and the deep and introverted "Her Memories" are, to some extent, very similar: in the future interstellar voyage, they are trapped in memories that should have dissipated due to the passage of time- which is often full of regrets- and there is a strong sense of "loneliness" in the style of film noir and a strong sense of smoke.
And in this vast interstellar space, no matter how close people are, everyone is alienated, and everyone is dealing with their own loneliness.
Yoko Kanno's 26-episode Star Cowboy (plus a film version) and the 44-minute "Her Memories" are brilliantly illustrated by two styles of sci-fi animated soundtracks (the former is a rainbow of many genres of music).
This is the most beautiful part of the anime that I think is "MEMORIES", for the glorious Japanese animation of the 90s.
But that's the melancholy part of Memories. The next two interesting sections, "The Stinkiest Weapon" and "Cannon Street," are another contrast, because that was another kind of scenery in Japanese animation at the time: absurd and ironic social observations.
"The Stinkiest Weapon" can be said to be in the same vein as the 1991 "Old Man Z" directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and Hiroyuki Kitakubo (Mr. Imatoshi of the Otomo Group at that time, in charge of art design in this film) is in the same vein: to put the perspective on the contemporary, to assume the problem caused by "high technology".
The artificial intelligence of caring for the elderly has become a transformer with a mission to achieve; the gold cold capsule that was accidentally eaten was originally a national-level killing weapon, and through "body odor", it can cause large-scale damage without gunpowder.
Steampunk-style "Cannon Street" is a utopian fable of Katsuyo Otomo, which implicitly alludes to the imperial brainwashing education of the state apparatus in the operation of shots that seem to expand animation technology (there is a powerful long mirror at the beginning).
"MEMORIES", led by Katsuyo Otomo, inherited and inspired the birth of various animations at various levels (of course, Imatoshi is the most significant example), and "MEMORIES", which has been around for twenty-six years, has now become a memory of "that generation".
When we look at these "memories", in addition to the various emotions handled with great skill in the animation, perhaps the most nostalgic thing is the production lineup that created the three stories of "MEMORIES".
At the beginning of the jazz game, "Star Cowboy" has a sentence that "OK. 3, 2, 1, Let's jam", which means that the orchestra is about to start improvising, about to start stirring with each other.
Although several of the creators who built these wonderful chapters have passed away, we can still see the results of the impromptu agitation in MEMORIES. And the lingering warmth that will always exist in the memory, now the feeling is still very moving--with the passage of time, even more moving.
Thank you for watching, paying attention to me, and learning more about it.