Memorîzu

Tonight, unable to get any work done on my dissertation, which is still languishing in a dark corner of my hard disk - and of my brain - and after wasting a ridiculous amount of time on social networking sites like Facebook, which I now officially consider the offspring of the devil, I indulged in a masterpiece by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, the writer of Akira, my favourite anime of all time.

And guess what? It blew me away.

Memorîzu (Memories) develops along three parallel story-lines, very different from each other, yet connected by an invisible thread.

In the first one, a group of astronauts follow a distress signal all the way into an abandoned spaceship relic, only to find it haunted by the ghost of a misterious opera singer, who will ultimately bring them to their graves.

The sinister undertones of this first section, Magnetic Rose, with its ominous atmospheres reminiscent of Blade Runner and of Danny Boyle's Sunshine, stand in stark contrast with the second episode of the film, Stink Bomb.

This is the story of a young researcher who inadvertently ingests a powerful biological weapon, triggering a chain reaction that will eventually lead to the destruction of Japan - and possibly of the whole world.

Funnily, despite the terrifying (and quite realistic, given the ineptitude of most of our governments) plot, this is the lightest of the three movies, thanks to the comedic central character, who persistently refuses to understand that he is the cause of so much destruction.

The third, final section of Memorîzu - Cannon Fodder- is perhaps the most visually compelling, although the storyline bears a classic Orwellian structure.

A city, suspended in a timeless Iron Age of industrialisation, is in a state of permanent war against an invisible enemy. Its people are maintained in a state of emergency and fear, endlessly labouring in a Marxian nightmare of military production targets and pervasive propaganda in an effort to defeat the enemy.

But what makes this section stand out is the beauty and uniqueness of its drawings, with its stylised figures moving helplessly amidst giant cannons that reminded me of those Soviet war propaganda posters from the 1930s.

A beautiful, beautiful film.