A WIND NAMED AMNESIA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This is a Japanese science fiction
animated film set in the United States. While it
has a few action fights, it is far less than most
Japanese anime and it has a stronger plot.
Unfortunately like an "X-FILES" episode it answers
a few questions and leaves far more questions
unanswered. The plot itself has similarities to
THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and DAMNATION ALLEY.
Rating: 5 (0 to 10), low +1 (-4 to +4)
It is San Francisco some time in the 1990s. The human race has somehow been reduced to a brutal, animalistic state. The cities are full of animal-people looking for what food they can find. One unnamed wanderer about twenty years old seems still have his mental faculties. He encounters the mysterious Sophia who also seems to be immune to the mindlessness. The wanderer remembers living in Arizona when a strange wind came blowing across the land. The wind seems to have blown away the memories and minds of everybody. Humans become snarling animals. The big take from the small, the strong take from the weak. Most victimized are children.
The wanderer tells Sophia that he remembers the coming of the wind and the loss of all his intelligence and memory. He remembers fighting to wrest sausages from some young children. Then he stumbled onto a government defense facility where a dying scientist, Johnny, had been working on memory enhancement. He is able to restore the wanderer's ability to remember and even some of the memory. But Johnny dies shortly after the wanderer finds him. Sophia listens to the wanderer's story and dubs him Wataru, literally the wanderer. Wataru and Sophia set off on a road trip to see the country and the devastation that has resulted from the amnesia. Meanwhile we see what they so not, that government satellites are tracking their progress.
The story naturally breaks into episodes, but after the opening in San Francisco there is one episode in Los Angeles and one in the desert, perhaps Utah. Suddenly our characters are on the East Coast. One scene is in front of a pillared building, perhaps Washington, and then New York. It feels like there should be more episodes as they come across the country. We are not cheated of the climactic fight, but we are cheated of a lot of understanding of why the battle is being fought and what is going on. The filmmakers had some impressive scenes that they wanted to include but they did not care to sweat the details that would have made this a real story. Instead it is just a collection of related incidents. This problem is not uncommon in Japanese animated films.
The biggest problem with the plot is that it raises so many questions and then answers so few of them. Who brought the wind? Why did they do it? How does it work? How widespread are the effects? Is there a cure? How long will it last? Who is Sophia? Why is she here? Why is Wataru being tracked by the government? To be a decent story most if not all of these questions should have been answered in the writer's mind. Only one of those questions is answered and not really very well. At under ninety minutes the film does not seem to have time for explanations. Leaving so much unanswered should bother the audience, but in the age of THE X-FILES the bar seems to have been lowered on that expectation.
General opinion is that the actual animation techniques in Japanese animation is very good. That very simply is not true. It is a lot better than bad Saturday morning animation. I think what people are responding to is not the animation techniques, which are primitive, but the art direction which actually is quite nice, though it does not stand out from other anime films.
A WIND NAMED AMNESIA has really only one good idea and it is used up in the first fifteen minutes of the film and it still feels incomplete. Oddly, the song over the end-credits begins in Japanese and then lapses into English. I rate it a 5 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1999 Mark R. Leeper
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