Three short films, three completely different genres, three reasons this is required viewing. Magnetic Rose pulls you into a space salvage mission that becomes a ghost story about a woman who refuses to stop existing, all scored to music that makes loneliness feel like a physical weight. Stink Bomb is absurdist comedy that destroys everything around a guy just trying to cure a cold. Cannon Fodder is a single day of mechanized war told through the eyes of people who stopped asking questions years ago. The animation in 1995 looked like it came from the future, every frame is built like a painting, and Yoko Kanno's soundtrack is the sound of each story's soul. This is what happens when you give artists freedom instead of a formula.

Three standalone short films make up this anthology movie. In the first, two engineers trace a distress signal to an abandoned space station, wander into a derelict mansion, and uncover a dark secret about Eva Friedel, a famous opera singer with a tragic past, as hallucinations threaten their sanity. In the second, lab technician Nobuo Tanaka swallows experimental pills he mistakes for cold medicine, and his gas turns lethal to everyone nearby while he heads for Tokyo with police, soldiers and foreign agents chasing him. In the third, a boy in a fortress city packed with cannons longs to outdo his father as an artillery officer, though no enemy nation is ever shown to exist. Memories changes tone with each installment, moving from chilling sci-fi romance to dark comedy to reflective commentary on modern war.