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  • Anvilicious: As "Stink Bomb" elaborates, if you're ill and have the option to stay at home, stay at home. You're worse than useless to your colleagues showing up to the laboratory sneezing over everyone, and not getting any work done.
  • Ass Pull: In "Stink Bomb", Nobuo managing to hijack one of the American Powered Armor suits to get to his boss. It is obvious from the Mass "Oh, Crap!" that the JSDF leaders and the American colonel perform at The Reveal that none of them had that as a plan, and Nobuo does not even seems to know how to handle the thing, let alone why the heck he decided - or managed - to hijack it.
  • Awesome Art: The animation for all three shorts is positively gorgeous. Bennett the Sage goes in-depth about just how complex some of the animation was, including that The Oner from "Cannon Fodder" required the use of artwork the size of a wall mural to capture it.
  • Awesome Music: All three shorts have incredible soundtracks, courtesy of Yoko Kanno, Hiroyuki Nagashima, and Jun Miyake. Special mention goes to the piece that plays throughout "Stink Bomb", starting out as a funky jazz mambo while Nobuo commutes to his job and becoming a high-octane acid freakout during the military's failed assaults on him; and the ending credits theme, "In Yer Memory", a fun techno beat which would be right at home in a late-night dance club.
  • First Installment Wins: The first short,"'Magnetic Rose", is the most well-known—likely because of Satoshi Kon's involvement.
  • Fridge Horror: During "Magnetic Rose", Heintz tries and fails to keep a music box with a blonde dancer from falling off the table. Later, we watch as his blonde daughter falls off the roof as he tries to save her.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In Russia, "Cannon Fodder" is best known from a fanmade music video to the Nautilus Pompilius song "Скованные одной цепью" (Bound By One Chain), to the point some commenters on YouTube state they were unaware this wasn't made specifically for the music video. The song touches the same topics of dystopia, collective responsibility and hopelessness, only applied to the USSR rather than fantasy World War 1-esque setting.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • "Stink Bomb", after one delves into the story behind the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant disaster of 2011. The problem in "Stink Bomb" escalates because the Japanese higher-ups try to save face by obfuscating the truth, fudging data, and keeping secrets, which is exactly how the Fukushima situation was allowed to get to the point it reached; the power plant might have shut down safely had it not been for the decades' worth of bureaucratic bullshit and buck-passing that hid the plant's weaknesses (like outdated equipment) from the government and the public alike.
    • The first two parts, particularly "Stink Bomb", after the coronavirus pandemic. There's an airborne "disease" that looks disturbingly like the common cold at first in "Stink Bomb" which causes mass exoduses and panic through lockdowns, after all. Meanwhile, "Magnetic Rose" is about being stuck in the past and memories, which people certainly felt after being locked down. The real kicker is how the ship in "Magnetic Rose" is called the "Corona"note .
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: It's impressive how much the design of the father in the "Cannon Fodder" sequence resembles Donovan Desmond. For further hilarity, the father is just some low-down cog in the machine while Desmond is one of the leaders of his country.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The Rampant AI in "Magnetic Rose", haunting Heintz with his most traumatic memory, and using a Lotus-Eater Machine on Miguel (and countless other corpses).
    • After the staggered terrorist attacks of the early 21st century, and the possibility of "dirty bombs" laid in populated areas, a lot of people would view the fallout of "Stink Bomb" in this way.
    • A protest group in "Cannon Fodder" is arguing against the use of hazardous materials in the gunpowder used to fire the shells. The father who works at one of the enormous guns is later reprimanded (for something that wasn't even his fault) and forced to stand within the firing chamber that is normally evacuated but for one operator, without his mask on. Given how pallid and haggard the art style makes everyone look, it adds more horror with the Forever War slowly killing its population from within (for no reason at all).
      • Even worse, the populace are so indoctrinated that none of them ever think to protest the war, only the methods being used to fight it.
  • Superlative Dubbing: When Discotek Media got the rights to release the movie in North America, they commissioned two dubbing studios—NYAV Post and Sound Cadence Studios—to dub it, echoing how the movies were made by two different production studios. The dubs for all three movies have received high praise since Discotek premiered it on their Twitch channel, with many calling Marc Swint's performance as Heinz the absolute highlight of Magnetic Rose. With Discotek being such a small company, they were under no obligation to dub the movie, nor did they have to go to the lengths they did to put so much effort into the dub, but the fact that they did only elevated Memories' overall quality and accessibility in the States.
  • Tearjerker: "Magnetic Rose" has more than a few moments that can bring tears. The worst may be finding out that, for cute little Emily, getting the spacesuit costume she always wanted... ended in her tragic death falling from the roof of her house, because she was eager to help her daddy and show off her new space-suit. No wonder Heintz spends so much time out on space missions. And just for good measure, he gets to watch his daughter fall to her death both from on the roof and, later, from the ground, where she literally passes through him, only able to interact with her hologram after she'd already hit the ground and "died" again. And, as Sage pointed out in his review of it, none of Heintz's coworkers knew about it.
  • The Woobie: Eva Friedel had a perfect life; she was born into royalty, was a renowned opera singer with critics calling her "the diva of the century", and was engaged to a fellow opera singer. Tragically, she lost the voice that made her famous, and her career suffered despite trying to pantomime her roles; if that wasn't bad enough, Carlo Rambaldi, her fiance, planned to leave her. Eva killed Carlo and fled to space, where she built a space station to live in seclusion with nothing but the memories of her past. After Eva's death, the central computer on the station went insane, taking on her identity and brainwashing visitors to the station to live out her master's delusional dream: a world based on her memories where Carlo never left her. Despite the horror of Magnetic Rose, you can't help but feel sad as all of it originated from tragedy.

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