Plastic Memories

Human/technology integration has always been a fascinating topic to me. Just thinking of humanity's next leap towards further development being aided by biomechanical intervention could cause even the cynical-minded to wax philosophical. It's a topic that's inspired countless debate and discussion for many; redefining the idea of what it means to be human with the continuously blurred line between man and machine. And what better way to view this delicate balancing act than by seeing it unfold through the guise of a romance. It's an interesting "what if" scenario, that, to those who share my fascination with the subject, could find many interesting facets onexploring that very idea. Can such a nebulous idea of "true love" be found with a man-made being? Where do we draw the line between augmented reality and primal attraction? Many different forms of media have tried to tackle this intriguing concept; from movies like 2013's "Her" and 2015's "Ex Machina," to novels like Jonathan Lethem's "As She Climbed Across the Table." There are even a few anime titles that tackled this subject as well, such as Eve No Jikan, Armitage III, Chobits and many others. When this topic is done right, it can be a highly rewarding experience, leaving the viewer with something to wrap their heads around. So when I sat down to watch Plastic Memories, a show that had the right ingredients to make something truly thought provoking, just flush this potential down the toilet, for what essentially was forced melodrama... let's just say I wasn't a happy camper when everything was said and done. Under normal circumstances, I would categorize shows with Plastic Memories's setup as a bait-and-switch, but from the way it was presented, it never seemed to care about, or even acknowledge the ideas it could have implemented. What we have here instead was a cookie cutter rom-com that was oblivious to its own potential. So no, I didn't get what I wanted, but does that render the rom-com that took its place bad?... Unfortunately yes, it does. It's a show that forces a catch-22 on the audience with an inevitable conclusion spurred on by contrived logistics. It suffered from heavy-handed manipulation at the cost of proper buildup and engagement, which was made all the more noticeable when you take into consideration the setting the show presents everything in. In the future, sentient androids known as "Giftias" has become incorporated into everyday society. However, like everything else that has a beginning, so too does the Giftias have a limited lifespan as well, with about a decade or so of functionality before they are decommissioned, resulting in their memories being erased (which is the android's equivalency of death). This, of course, becomes the core focus of the show, as we're introduced to our protagonist Tsukasa, a human, who finds himself involved with one of these Giftias named Isla. And from there onward, the show chronicles their daily interaction and growing relationship. And as you would guess, it becomes a tale of a fleeting would-be romance with only one possible outcome. When trying to present a romance, there must be proper interaction between the main love interests in order to sell their position as lovers. We as viewers need to see this bond slowly form, see the chemistry that they share, and the mannerisms that they portray when expressing themselves to each other. To get down to brass tacks, we as viewers need to be convinced of their validity as a couple for it to feel organic. If this isn't handled properly, it can cause the relationship and development to feel forced or manipulated. This is Plastic Memories 1st noticeable blunder. It tries to build this chemistry on a premise that just screams victimizing; with a character predestined to be terminated from an expiration date, a protagonist that makes no visible effort in repealing the outcome, and a romance bound to go nowhere because of it. It isn't bittersweet nor is it heart-wrenching since the reason these androids expire is contrived and contradictory to the world setting presented. How may you ask? Well, let's explore the ill-defined logic the show tries to spoon feed us. We're made to believe that this show takes place in a future where the creation and distribution of androids are a fairly commonplace occurrence. In other words, it's an advance society that's leagues ahead of us in terms of technological breakthrough and scientific advancement. But at the same time, the show wants us to believe that they have no methods of storing or switching memory from one device to another. And I shouldn't have to spell it out but do you see how this nonsensical explanation doesn't work? A society advance enough to have androids with empathy, but not advance enough to store memory or transfer it? So if you own a USB flash drive, then congrats, you've officially surpassed this society's current intellect. And that is just the tip of the iceberg when talking about this show's implausible setting. Later on, we find out that after an android passes its expiration date and isn't decommissioned, they take on a savage state, becoming dangerously violent against humans, escalating to the point of murder (in other words, they go ape-shit). Which begs the question, why in the hell would anyone endorse a machine that can go "Terminator" on citizens when they lose their memory? It's unfathomable to think any governing body with a modicum of common sense would allow such a hazardous time bomb to be integrated into society. There was even an episode dedicated to showing how such a terrible downside could reek havoc, or even worse, be exploited as a weapon, but like the setting it's a part of, it was never explored beyond that. It was simply brought up and never mentioned again by the next episode just so they could allow for more rom-com moments to continue undisturbed. Just look out for the 'Psycho-Pass' episode, you'll know it when you see it. Tsukasa and Isla both work at the same job, and it's also the place they 1st make contact with each other. From what you can easily read in the synopsis, they both work for the Terminal Service Department: a subdivision of the larger company responsible for the distribution and recall of androids. They're tasked with retrieving androids that are approaching their expected expiration date from their owners. This, of course, brings up yet another question; why is the task of retrieving androids so primitive and counterproductive? Like I've stated, these androids are like ticking time bombs with the added bonus of being empathetic. You would think something as important as this would be tasked to a more organized unit, but what we're introduced to instead is a motley crew of quirky characters that only share one personality trait and act so outlandish that entrusting them with such a task is almost ludicrous. It's like handing police duty over to the circus. It's like the creators were dead-set on an end goal and didn't care how little sense it made getting there. On a whole, the sci-fi elements of this show were never explored or utilized. It was simply used for flavoring, and it quickly became apparent that they didn't care about common sense when they duct-taped the narrative and setting together. The relationship was also diminished by the fact that 3/4ths of the show's run-time were dedicated to slapstick comedy and silly misunderstandings. Half of it was wasted away where it could have been used to develop the relationship between the characters, which was made even worse given the short episode count the show was already working with. While I'm not the biggest fan of shows like Clannad or Toradora, I at least acknowledge that it did this aspect correctly. It utilized its run-time by building the relationship between the characters, either by their direct contact with each other or the indirect result of their influence on each other. It allowed us as an audience to grow attached to their interaction and relationship. Most of the characters, like I've already stated, are just a range of archetypes. From your tsunderes to your beta-male, they all follow one-note traits and won't be remembered for anything else. This also applies to our two main characters. Tsukasa is as generic as a protagonist can get, ripped right out of the pages of cliché-land. You've seen his type many times before, and to be quite frank about it, he's indistinguishable from the lot of them. Isla is yet another Rei Ayanami clone, completely packaged with the silver hair, red eyes, and the signature porcelain complexion. Dull, monotone and devoid of personality, the only good thing I can say about her is that she truly acts like an android. Outside of the main cast, we're occasionally introduced to androids and their masters that the team has to retrieve. But they're introduction is done more so for forced "feels" than for actual world building. Just toss in a sappy backstory and an unavoidable conclusion and it really becomes more annoying than anything. And really, that's the main problem with this show in a nutshell: it's constantly trying to get the audience to care but doesn't seem to have any idea how to do so without coming across as fake. It's a show that forcefully tugs at your heart strings while thinking that people will easily be duped into falling for it. It thinks that simply playing melancholic music and animating tear ducts is more than enough to fool viewers, while forgetting that genuine character investment is what allows the audience to sympathize with hardships. And who knows, maybe this falsehood would fool some into buying the creator's snake oil. There are certainly viewers out there willing to suspend their disbelief, regardless of the amount of mental gymnastics required to do so. But for those well-versed enough to see past the smoke and mirrors, it's a detracting quality that causes the show and its conflict to implode on itself. The art and animation for Plastic Memories were above average and made the whole experience better than it would have been without it. It was bright, vivid and used a broad range of color palettes to convey whatever mood or tone they were going for. While it felt overdone at times, there were moments where it truly shined and help to sell the scene at hand; most notably the show's finale episodes and epilog. While the art and animation served their purpose, the character designs were a hit or miss. On one hand, a few had distinct features about them, but a lot were also cookie-cutter in a bad way as well. It helps to better personify their characteristics, but when they lack dimension and personality, it made them feel like carbon copies of other characters in the same vein as them. There was also moments where the show paid direct homage to Evangelion with certain scenes and shot compositions, which, while being a fun little tribute, didn't serve any purpose whatsoever. At best, they were Easter eggs for those that caught on to them. The soundtrack was a mixture of pop and electronica flavoring. It was "fluffy" during the comedic bits and took on a more somber tone during the show's more "emotional" moments. While there weren't any noteworthy tracks, it was fine and served its purpose. Average but effective. The opening and ending themes were both fine and easy listens. Nothing that might stick with you but catchy and worked in unison with the show. Like most titles of this nature, my problem doesn't stem from what it's trying to do, my problem comes from how poorly it goes about attempting it. If a show is aiming to get me as a viewer, emotionally invested, I expect it to do so in a manner that doesn't distract from its target intent. If I'm duped and fall for it, despite my better knowledge of its intent, I will credit it for its efforts. However, if I'm viewing the show and have to signal the "bullshit" flag every other minute, then as far as I'm concerned, that anime failed at its job. Enjoyment: 4/10 My enjoyment of Plastic Memories was intermittent at best, but for the most part, the show was a face-palming experience. Because of the sloppy portrayal of its themes and forced melodrama, there was no engagement to speak of. The ending was decent, but the journey to said ending was buffoonish at best and can't be overlooked. Overall: 4/10 Plastic Memories was an uninspired and underwhelming experience. It had the opportunity to craft a decent romance, or even better, a good sci-fi tale, but it did neither and ended up falling short of the mark. While some might find it touching, I simply couldn't buy into the dilemma for the reasons I've stated. If you decide to watch this show, do so with low expectations, for whatever it tried to do, have been done to a much higher and better degree somewhere else.

**SPOILER FREE REVIEW** While Plastic Memories had the potential to be a unique and intelligent show, it instead managed to encompass all of the things that ruin dramas and cause them to fail every time. Forced plot devices that make no sense? Check. Inopportune comedy that ruins the show’s tone? Check. Shallow characters defined entirely by their archetypes or tragic backstories? Check. While this anime showed flashes of good ideas and has its moments, its poor execution dooms it to be lost among the sea of poorly written, mediocre emotion porn. Synopsis: In the near future, technology has allowed for the invention humanoid-like robots known as “giftias”,who look, talk, feel, and emote exactly like actual humans do. The catch is that they can only operate for a little over a decade before they must be shut down, resulting in the loss of all their memories. The story follows Tsukasa, a human, and his relationship with Isla, a giftia. The biggest and most obvious problems with this anime stem from its forced and melodramatic plot devices that range from just plain stupid to cringeworthy. For example, when Tsukasa and Isla first become partners at work, we are suddenly told that this means they have no choice but to live together! Because that makes total sense and is definitely not a lazy plot device to provide a setup for bonding and slice of life shenanigans! The other one that sticks out is the big “reveal” they make about what happens to giftias if they aren’t properly retrieved, which defies all notions of common sense and even basic science. That’s especially bad given that this show has a science-fiction setting for some reason. In fact… was there ANY reason for there to be robots in the first place? Literally the only difference between a human and a giftia is that giftias lose their memories after a certain period of time, so now that I think about it, that makes the entire sci-fi setting and concept of giftias in general completely pointless and nothing more than yet another contrived plot device for drama’s sake. They certainly didn’t explore any sort of difference between the two life forms; it’s very much an accepted fact that giftias are equal to humans, so why was everyone not just regular people to begin with? Was there no other scenario they could come with that incorporated death-like elements, like, y’know, DEATH? It’s this kind of thing that makes the show very difficult to take seriously. There are other major issues with the show’s plot, namely how laughably predictable it is. You can LITERALLY guess every major plot point of the entire show by the end of the first episode, and I’m not exaggerating, because I literally did. I just kept waiting and waiting for something that I didn’t see coming a mile away to happen, and with the exception of a single contrived plot device which I already mentioned (a plot device that doesn’t even lead to anything…), it simply never does. Now, one thing that I will give the show credit for is that is has some genuinely sweet moments. The final stretch of the show made me feel something, at least. However, then it just sort of… ends. And it ends, like, EXACTLY how you would expect it to. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that it left me with a feeling of “So what?” I mean, you told one of the most obvious and straightforward stories I’ve ever seen, so much so that I could have stopped watching after a single episode and gotten the gist of it, so what did you put into your show that justified the time it took to watch another 12 episodes? Were there any meaningful themes? No. Did the characters learn anything or change in any meaningful way? No. So why would anyone EVER want to watch the entirety of this show? *Sigh, I don’t know if this is making sense. Let’s just move on: The last aspect of the plot that really bothered me was the random comedy that completely ruined the show’s tone by being interspersed throughout parts that are supposed to be serious. To give an example, the first episode of this show really hooked me. At the very end of the episode, there was a well-executed and genuinely emotional scene that was actually getting to me. I’m the kind of person who almost never gets legitimately emotional when watching a TV show, but this one scene was just hitting all the right notes for me. By the time it was over, I thought we had an extremely promising show on our hands. Now, guess what this beautiful, emotional scenario was immediately followed by: …A BATHROOM JOKE. That’s right. No relevance, no context. They just decided to throw in a random bathroom joke and ended the episode on a ridiculous note instead of a serious and powerful one. That, to me, is a decent microcosm of the entire show. Every time you might be about to get invested in a serious scene, WHAM! Random, generic, slice-of-life comedy comes out of nowhere and blindsides the plot. It’s just a disastrous display of a lack of tonal understanding and, ergo, bad writing. I think the real thing that would have saved Plastic Memories for me was if the characters were given any form of depth whatsoever. Tsukasa, our protagonist, is a cardboard cutout straight from the generic, beta, male protagonists factory. My god, there was, nothing, NOTHING unique about him. I don’t think I’m alone in the sediment that I don’t care about other people’s relationships if I don’t know them, and I certainly didn’t feel like I knew Tsukasa, so how am I supposed to give a damn about him and Isla’s relationship? Speaking of Isla, talk about yet another shallow character. I put her squarely in the mary-sue category, given that she is an idealization of a pure, innocent, kawaii waifu with no real flaws whatsoever. Can she be funny at times? Sure. Does that mean I at all cared about her? No. As for the side characters? Boring. Bland. Generic. They are all basic stereotypes with nothing to distinguish them. I know they attempt to give a few of the side characters a backstory, but the backstories don’t actually accomplish anything other than just being sad. They do absolutely nothing to add a dimension to the character they are attached to and none of them are given any form of a story arc. I’ve seen casts like this a million times. The characters, to me, might be the biggest reason the show failed. I might have been able to overlook all the previously mentioned problems with the plot if this show actually gave me a reason to care about the couple of Tsukasa and Isla, but they simply don’t. Pretty much the only thing I can definitively say I liked about Plastic Memories was the animation. It’s pretty fluid, but what really got me was the cinematography and shot composition. Besides the number of Evangelion references they threw in, there were a lot of well thought out and extremely well directed scenes that actually succeeded in conveying information and emotion without words. That’s VERY difficult for a show to do, so kudos for that. The settings were always detailed and full of bright colors as well. The world looked really cool, which is part of the reason I wanted them to actually tell me something about it. Like, literally anything would have been nice. Instead, the writing is so barebones that it could have taken place pretty much anywhere else, and that brings us full circle, doesn’t it? I wanted to like Plastic Memories. Really, I did. It didn’t have to be some complex, philosophical inquiry into the definition of humanity and how it differs from artificial intelligence (which is the kind of show that many expected it to be); I would have been totally content with it just being a drama if they actually gave me a reason to care about its characters. If they didn’t ruin every moment they ever created with inopportune comedy. If they didn’t make the plot so damn predictable. If their plot devices weren’t so incredibly contrived. There were simply too many major problems to overlook, and that forces me to make the sad conclusion that Plastic Memories is a massive missed opportunity for what could have been a really enjoyable original anime. It lacked direction and coherent writing on all fronts, and I cannot recommend it to anybody.

Plastic memories will leave you crying like a baby, questioning your very existence. You ask yourself "How will I go on after watching this?", The answer is.. you don't. Just hide out in your pillow fort and wait for the day Giftia's are invented. Oh you came here for Action and Blood? This isn't Attack on Titan, but we'll let these feels kick you straight in the face. Watch Plastic Memories and cry your little heart out. Just when you think you are safe, BAM, the feels got you. Throw aside your happy tissues and bust out the Sad Tissues. The feels dont care aboutyou.. You think you're safe? HA. You need to watch this, because if you don't, when you're old and gray and laying on a bed about to take your last breath You will ask yourself, "Did I really live life to its fullest?" and Naotaka Hayashi will bust through your wall and give you a much deserved swift punch to the kidneys.

There is so much wrong with Plastic Memories that it should never have been created. It is literally about a dude who falls in love with a midget robot who also happens to be a minor. Story 1/10 : The anime has no real plot progression because everything is pushed back to the beginning after the last episode. The show tries to have the audience learn some messages and themes through the experiences of Tsukasa and Isla, but Tsukasa is this basic dude who has no reason to be heavily impacted by these messages. "Giftias" are the focal point of the sci-fi setting, but theydon't make any sense whatsoever. I don't believe one person would go to the pet store and decide to pick out the human. Setting 5/10: The setting is the only decent thing about Plastic Memories is the futuristic atmosphere that is unfortunately overwhelmed by the stereotypical design choices Characters -5/10: I don't even know what to say. Tsukasa is by far the worst main character I have ever seen in an anime who acts completely like an NPC throughout the entire show. Isla is a robot that you are supposed to care about because she is going out of commission in a year or so. Batteries die all the time and all you have to do is replace them. *rest of the review here Conclusion: If you want to sit down and actually enjoy a show, don't waste your time with Plastic Memories. Everyone says that it makes you "rethink your life", but the only thing you'll be rethinking was the last 4 hours you spent wasted on this show.