Product Details

• Actors: Shigeru Chiba, Hisao Egawa, Kayoko Fujii, Nobuaki Fukuda, Ami Hasegawa
• Directors: Katsuhiro Ohtomo, Kôji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura
• Writers: Katsuhiro Ohtomo, Satoshi Kon
• Producers: Katsuhiro Ohtomo, Shigeru Watanabe
• Format: AC-3, Anamorphic, Animated, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Japanese (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: February 24, 2004
• Run Time: 113 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00014X8KO
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,986 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Memories" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

The masters of anime join forces to create this stunning animated film featuring three separate stories: Magnetic Rose, Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder. In Magnetic Rose, two space travellers are drawn into an asteroid world created by one woman's memories. In Stink Bomb, a young lab assistant accidentally transforms himself into a human biological weapon set on a direct course to Tokyo. Cannon Fodder depicts a day in the life of a city whose entire purpose is the firing of cannons at the enemy. Created by the world’s leading animé talent: Koji Morimoto (The Animatrix), Tensai Okamuro (Android Kikaider: The Animation), Katsuhiro Ôtomo (Upcoming Steamboy, Akira), Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Three amazing short films from true legends of the genre, October 10, 2004

By 

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories (DVD)

I'm still pretty new to this wide new world of anime, so I can't really compare Memories to other works in the genre. I can say that it is a most interesting and impressive production made up of three very different short films from some of the leading names in anime. I don't think the visuals are quite as dazzling as that of more recent anime films, but the artistry of these three episodes certainly does help define the very different worlds in which the action takes place and demonstrates the compelling, visceral powers of anime. We have the celebrated Katsuhiro Otomo to thank for this project; each of the three films, if I'm not mistaken, was adapted from a short manga piece in Otomo's graphic novel Memories.

Episode One is Magnetic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto of Animatrix fame. This is a beautiful, haunting tale of a most unusual space rescue mission. The crew of a space garbage collection ship responds to a distress signal from a dead part of space. Two crew members board the debris-shrouded vessel and enter a completely different world, one fueled by the memories of a beautiful young opera singer who apparently retreated to the isolation of space following a tragedy in her life. I won't pretend to have understood every thing about this story, but it is wholly captivating. The men encounter lavish rooms including opera houses and living quarters fit for a princess, holograms and other visual artifacts of "the young Madam" Eva entertaining guests and audiences, and decayed artifacts that sometimes come to life in front of their eyes. Each man is soon drawn into the vivid, colorful world of Eva's memories, but only one recognizes the unreality behind the vivid scenes he encounters - in his case, though, memories of his own wife and child serve as fuel for the increasingly realistic episodes he experiences. Much of the story takes place to a soundtrack of beautiful opera music such as that of Puccini, and the combination of such grand music and the amazing visual miracles that define anime of the highest caliber make this a most powerful film indeed.

Episode Two, Stink Bomb from director Tensai Okamura, goes in a completely different direction. Existing in some nebulous space between dark comedy and grim political satire, Stink Bomb is certainly entertaining but much less powerful than the other two films. In this story, a young scientific researcher takes an experimental fever pill that turns out to be something else entirely. He awakes to find everyone in the building comatose or dead (it's never really clear to me), and panicked company executives order him to find the pills and the secret documentation related to them so that he can bring everything to them in Tokyo immediately. He does just that, but he comes across death and destruction everywhere he goes. He does not understand that he has become a biological weapon emanating deadly gas from within his own body. It's almost comical to see the military firepower brought to bear - quite fruitlessly - against him as the military seeks to stop the spread of the noxious gas. The ending is also somewhat comical, on a dark level.

The last and shortest of the films comes from Katsuhiro Otomo himself. Cannon Fodder is an extremely dark film that vividly portrays a day in the life of a militaristic society along the lines of a post-modern day Prussia (i.e., pointy helmets are big in this world) dedicated solely and completely to the continued firing of gigantic cannons against some nebulous enemy. The obvious interpretation is one of the insanity of warfare, and the dark tones and grimly drawn characters bring the message home in a powerful fashion. Interestingly, the entire action seems to consist of one continuous shot that moves fluidly from one scene to another.

Memories dates back to 1995, but it is certainly an impressive example of anime's unique strengths and possibilities. The music, I should mention, plays an integral role in each film, especially Magnetic Rose - I think this DVD is worth owning just for this first amazing film alone. Otomo, Morimoto, and Okamuro are the same masters of anime who gave the world such wonders as Akira, Animatrix, and Ghost in the Shell, so anime newbies can rest assured that Memories will not disappoint.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Artistic Genius at work, August 22, 2004

By 

Radman (East Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memories (DVD)

Of the three works in "Memories", each is extremely different and contribute to a very entertaining and thought-provoking work as a whole.
"Magnetic Rose" combines beatiful artistry and harrowing audio and visual effects to create an ambience like something from a work by M. Night Shaymalan. The masterful audio score by the musical genius Yoko Kanno contributes greatly to the short. Both chilling and provocative, "Magnetic Rose" is the overall best from the three works in "Memories"
"Stink Bomb" is purely entertaining. Right from the start, we as viewers connect with the poor pharmaceutical researcher we see before us and his plight throughout this very comical and incredulous short. The music as well helps keep a "groove" as the movie flows smoothly throughout.
"Cannon Fodder" is easily the most under-appreciated work of the three. Much reminiscient of the WWII "Maus" comic written by a Jew after his experiences in Nazi-occupied Germany, "Cannon Fodder" takes us to a world that is not full of ghosts and spaceships, nor unbelievable biochem weapons, but a world not too much unlike our own- where people are vulnerable and controlled by unseen forces. It is the most thought provoking, and its style is completely apart from popular animation styles of today. The most intersting part is that the movie is one cut- meaning the backrground flows entirely throughout the movie without the scene in front us chaging suddenly.
As a whole, "Memories" offers something for everybody- from the scary moviegoer to the saturday night funny flick watcher to the ponderous artist- definitely worth 2 hours of your time.

27 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Review of the Video Quality !, March 9, 2004

By 

Siju Thomas (India) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories (DVD)

I think many people have written about the virtues of the films,
I would like to comment on the digital mastering,This has been a favourite movie of mine for some time and I have been waiting for a R1 release the Japanese version was far too expensive.I was expecting a remastering job of the Quality that was done on Akira,
and I expected the result to be breathtaking,(especially on Magnetic Rose)I opened the package put the disc in ,and to my disdain ,the video looks like a rather clean laserdisc print, there is no evidence of 720\480 resolution of dvd it looked more like 352/480
of half d1 resolution.most of the time the lines on the characters facial detail , in mid shots are all smudgy ,overall it has a washed out look ,no deep blacks either,I am appalled ,one of the most beautiful films had to get a shoddy transfer like this.I have seen it on a 36 inch widescreen hdtv in 480p mode through a progressive scan player.this confirms my suspicion that the japanese directors are not approving the final transfers for the r1 discs, A similiar case was the movie Jin-roh, Another case of a beautiful film done to death by a smudgy low res transfer.