Magnetic Rose
Watching Magnetic Rose is seeing an entire bulk of modern anime come into being. The protagonists of a futuristic age descend into a beautiful abandoned relic of the old civilization, lost in the vacuum of space. In the foyer of an ornate mansion, one remarks “it’s like a dream”. With a laugh, the other one responds “more like a nightmare”. The second one was right on target. The holograms of the memories of a dead opera singer mesh into a wasteland of junk and magnetism, and while all the old pieces of her life crumble at a touch, something pulses through the place, subdued and intangible yet vibrant and real. Soon they find themselves separated, and are both led to experience her life from two completely different perspectives. One slowly falls into her memories, unable to pull himself away from what he sees. The other escapes, only to have everything turned around as his own memories begin to materialize.
All the while there is a stunning blend of sound—both natural and narrative, but the two are often indistinguishable—and opposing imageries, and while there are possible concrete explanations for the terror they experience, even us as viewers are completely sucked in to the surrealism of it all. When the characters first appear at the beginning, they share banal chatter that ends up exposing the most vital pieces of their character, each one acting drastically to the attributes that seemed most mundane at the outset. It is clever, it can be funny, and it thoroughly draws us in to their characters, even with so little time for exposition. In some senses they are one-dimensional characters, each playing a specific role in their tale. But in the narrative we only spend a few hours with them, which keeps us from feeling like they are truly one-dimensional people. We see only a glimpse of them, and with that we are allowed to experience the madness from different perspectives, wondering what events led them to that point.
But the real star is Eva Friedel, the opera singer whose home they explore. Little by little we see how her life was lived out. Little by little we see why her memories are so perfectly preserved. Little by little our characters are drawn in, both literally and mentally. Her imagery is stunning, and her story is told fantastically in the 44 minutes allotted. In more modern anime this sort of storytelling appears many times, as a way of the protagonists metaphysically learning about the lives of those that have passed, as well as exploring their own lives and motives further. In such cases there is rarely the stark futuristic feeling that Magnetic Rose gives as a counterpoint to the memories being explored. The cyberpunk setting works so well because it paints its own image of hell, and truly makes us feel as if the characters are in an unknown setting. At the end when the image of Eva and all her fans freely flits between machine and human is when we are forced to ponder the world we have been given.
Stink Bomb
Stink Bomb is a comedy about accidental mass manslaughter. It couldn’t be made today, and certainly not to be hilarious. But made it was, and hilarious it is. The plot is a simple screwball setup, where an office worker at a pharmaceutical company named Tanaka Nobuo has been taking all sorts of pills to rid himself of his persistent flu, and eventually tries a set of pills lying on his boss’ desk. Unfortunately, rather than a cure for the common cold, they turn out to be bioweapons that cause him to emit lethal gas to everyone in his building, and indeed the entire city. When he wakes up and finds the mess (of dead people), he contacts his superiors to figure out how to proceed, at which point they tell him to bring the pills and some papers to them in Tokyo. What ensues is the death of hundreds of soldiers, citizens, and government agents, all while the one clumsy and completely clueless Nobuo tries to find food and people who are not dead.
How he does not notice that it is specifically around him is a mystery. The real answer is because the story would not be funny for very long otherwise. Other touches, such as the bioalarm that detects pathogens and toxic chemicals and the flowers blooming in the wake of his noxious gas, are introduced purely to give the story an aesthetic flair, which really shows the director’s commitment to make the story enjoyable and engaging. As in Magnetic Rose, little details from the beginning add up to consistent storytelling throughout, and small shots like Nobuo’s trash can and the television program at the beginning in the doctor’s office give the world a quality of depth, of the director having really lived in the world in his mind.
Some odd nationalism enters the fray when the Americans arrive with their schemes and motives behind the incident, which would be out of place until the whole thing eventually explodes into an international peacekeeping situation. Stink Bomb truly takes the joke as far as it can go without being obnoxious (or noxious as the case may be), and there is a kind of dirty fun at laughing while people are dying left and right. In more recent shows, there have been similar gags where a small mishap escalates well beyond its means, with everyone suffering somehow in the wake of disaster. Then the next scene comes and everything is back to normal. Stink Bomb never shows us the next scene, and it is a little terrifying to imagine what it might be. But why do that when it can just be funny instead?
Cannon Fodder
Finally we have Cannon Fodder, the shortest and most visually bizarre of the three, which encapsulates a day in the life of an ordinary family in a town whose sole purpose is to make war. Children are raised to understand ballistics, women produce shell after shell in factories, and the men fire shots from giant cannons as quickly as they can. And by quickly, I mean at most four a day. The bureaucratic process seems deeply entrenched, preventing anything from truly happening at a reasonable rate. The father of the family works at one such cannon, and we see him as a nervous wreck, although this never quite comes to a head. The mother makes shells during the day and makes food to support the family by night. The son is obsessed with becoming the one who fires the cannon directly, but we also get hints that he is a slightly lackluster student, implying that everyone else is even more fanatical than him.
The details of the visuals are incredibly detailed and precise, with cannon and war imagery in every small piece of scenery. My personal favorite touch is the alternative roman letters, of which the ‘S’ is the SS symbol from World War II. Every object in the scenes is given special attention, and each shot looks as if it must have taken weeks to draw. And actually, there are no real distinct shots, as every scene fades into one another in a single unbroken camera movement (there is actually one cut that can be seen towards the end, but even the shots it separates have a visual equivalence that makes them blend together). As of the writing of this review, Birdman just won best picture and best editing at the Oscars for much the same reason; the entire two hour movie was edited to look like an unbroken take. Context aside I prefer Birdman’s execution, but Cannon Fodder has a more specific use for this style, to make life in the town feel endless and unceasing. Likewise with the perspective, which deliberately violates normal three-dimensional space in order to violate the rigid order established by the militant atmosphere.
As a criticism of a society revolving around war and unquestioned authority, naturally the boy asks the eventual question: “Dad, who are we fighting?” Most works would either give the father a moment of reflection to grab for an answer and find that answer lacking, or would have him explain the presumed lie he was fed when he was a child asking his own father. The answer, however, is simply “You’ll find out when you’re older.” What a brilliant answer, Not only is it a lie he was probably fed as a child, and not only does it not answer anything, but it implies that no one does actually find out when they are older telling their own kids the same lie. Not only does nobody know, but at a certain point, nobody cares.