The animation film consisting of three unrelated animated short films, the director and screenwriter are also different, anyway, there are Katsuyo Otomo and Imatoshi, which can be described as a Brahmanical festival. Since the director's interview hammered the memory is just a blind name, only the first story has a clear relationship with the memory, so let's not over-interpret it. But these three stories are indeed related in some places, such as the future, present, and past at different points in time, and the content corresponds to the reality of Japan.
The first one, "Her Memories." The plot resembles the Legend of the Siren, whose song confuses passing sailors. A singer who has lived in the memory of her youth all her life + AI that has been influenced by her obsession and has gone on a rampage after her death, space opera literally (laughs) and cyberpunk in a sense. It is the most beautiful and most terrifying film in the whole film, that is, the visual sense, the intersection of reality and memory, true and false, many transitions are impressive. As for the connection with Japanese reality, considering that the release time of the memories trilogy was 1995, it can be interpreted as Japan's nostalgia for the former strong country and the people's wealth after the bubble burst.
The second part, "The Stinkiest Weapon". A scientific research migrant worker mistakenly took a biological weapon as a cold medicine, became the most smelly weapon, and finally unconsciously destroyed the story of Japan. It is the only one of the three with a more relaxed atmosphere, and it is estimated that it is deliberately put this funny absurd drama in the middle to ease the atmosphere. Although, objectively speaking, this is the biggest tragedy, after all, the whole of Japan is extinct. The core of comedy is tragedy, and God's perspective is happy to see it.
The protagonist never knew that he was a weapon, and just because he received the order from his superior, he ran from a small place to Tokyo without hesitation, even if the tank cannon could not stop the heart of the worker. On the one hand, this is very funny, on the other hand, there are more layers of people who often do bad things unconsciously @ Stanford Prison Experiment.
If the connection between the previous part and the reality of Japan is still relatively weak, then the latter two are more obvious in this regard. "The Stinkiest Weapon" obviously complains about the relationship between Japanese workplace culture and the United States and Japan, after all, this biological and chemical weapon was developed by the United States, and it was also the American father's request not to kill the male protagonist to recover the experimental sample. The result, of course, is the failure of recycling, and it stinks to death in front of the male protagonist. When it comes to the recent coronavirus, it seems that it is still quite a prophet.
The third part, "Cannon Street", was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. It mainly talks about a place where the building is full of cannons, and the only life of the day is to fire at the enemy who does not know who it is, describing the life of a family of three under totalitarianism. The father worked as an artilleryman in the "front line", the mother built bombs in the bomb factory, and the son learned about bombs at school. The ending is also quite open, and at night's sleeptime, a beam of light sweeps into the room with the sound of an alarm, and the whole film ends. I don't know if this is a normal curfew alarm or an enemy night attack, but there is no hope for either one.
The style is unique, with steampunk backgrounds + puppet-like characters. It is a very obvious satire on the inhumanity of militarism, but the specific type is more like dystopia. People often make an analogy with 1984, but this setting is actually more like a short film called "Denver's Luckiest One", and it is also two places that do not know why they like to shoot at each other all day long. But cannon street focuses on militarism, while Denver is american middle class.
This connection with The Reality of Japan is naturally World War II, militarism. In fact, the previous one also had World War II, and in the high-level conference room there was a book that said 731. In this way, the latter two are related to the alienation of ordinary people under a large system. It's just that Cannon depicts the system itself, while Stinkiest Weapon envisions what kind of jokes small people can make in extreme situations.