Wednesday, 25 November 2009

A Wind Named Amnesia: Film Review

Title: A Wind Named Amnesia (Kaze no Na wa Amunejia)
Writer: Hideyuki Kikuchi
Director: Kazuo Yamazaki
Year: 1990


If there is a person misanthropic enough to be following all of these reviews, they might have noticed a trend in mine. I tend to be drawn by tales that are of a post-apocalypse setting. A Wind Named Amnesia fits this bill, and while I wasn’t disappointed, neither did I have my mind blown.

The film is set in the distant future, or at the very least in what must have counted for that in 1990. It is strange watching a film which is set in a dystopian future, but a future which is set roughly 10 years ago. Our first experience of the film is a quick gritty gambol around the ruins of San Francisco, 1999. Groups of barbaric humans roam the streets, or flee in terror from a pilotless guardian, a robotic mini-mecha style machine that hunts down humans and kills them. The inhabitants of San Francisco, and indeed the entire world, have been reduced to the state of primitive man by a wind which blew through the planet in 1990, wiping out the memory of almost everyone.

The story follows Wataru, who manages to overcome the amnesia and re-learn the ways of the world, thanks to the help of a wheelchair-bound child named Johnny. Wataru first encounters Johnny when he stumbles upon the destroyed remains of an experimental government facility while searching for food. Johnny has escaped the amnesia because of the experiments conducted on him in the facility, experiments to increase his memory. Through extensive teaching, Wataru is able to speak again, and is eventually able to function in a way we would deem ‘normal’. It is Johnny who gives him the name ‘Wataru’, explained as meaning ‘one who travels around’.

The retelling of his back-story takes place as he explains it to Sophia, a stranger who helped him defeat the guardian in San Francisco, an enigmatic platinum-haired woman who has retained her memories and doesn’t wear shoes, in what I would describe as a dangerously impractical affectation, especially given the volatile state of the world. It doesn’t take long for them to agree to travel together, and so begins the hypothetical examination of what a world full of reasonless, animalistic primitive humans would amount to.

On their travels they encounter a crude society which is ruled and driven by a blind fear of their god, named the Smasher-Devourer, whose raw and unsystematic fury can only be sated, so they believe, through a ‘marriage’ to a new wife. It is such a ‘wife’, Sue, that Wataru and Sophia chance across, being pursued by a ragged ensemble due to her fleeing the night before her wedding day. She is eventually saved by the ironically named Little John, a hulking, bearded behemoth of a man, who fights off the others. Bearing in mind these individuals are still in a primitive, pre-language state, it is through the use of Sophia’s unexplained lay-on-hands ability that their names are gleaned. She also discovers that this ‘marriage’ is essentially human sacrifice, to a humungous crane that has been, for lack of a better word, pimped to include weaponry, specifically mechanical limbs of the grabby and crushy varieties. And lasers.

They also come across a, seemingly, utopian super-city in the desert, controlled and protected by a giant, central supercomputer. What initially appears to be a safe haven, whose inhabitants have escaped the amnesia, is, in reality, merely an empty shell. The city’s two inhabitants, whose names may have their origin in satire, are Lisa and Simpson, who seem to be hollow puppets, manipulated by the supercomputer to simulate the previous life of the city, and so they spend their days role-playing the lives of the former inhabitants.

Wataru is also forced to have an iconic and symbolic showdown with the guardian he defeated in San Francisco, which has repaired itself and made weapon-based improvements, and then chased him across most of America.

The events which are observed by Wataru and Sophia are meant to portray, and in some ways answer, the question that is often brought up in the film, which seems to be: “What is the true nature of man?” Quite an ambitious query to set yourself up for, and one that, for me at least, the film doesn’t really deal with adequately, settling for an open-ended conclusion.

But while I was being disappointed with the paucity of the films reply to its own questions, I was also being distracted by my nagging “oh, whose voice is that?” style half-remembrances of the cast. It didn’t take long for me to place Wataru as Kazuki Yao, one of my personal favourite seiyuu, whose standout roles for me where in One Piece (Jango, Bon Clay, Franky) and also in Tenjho Tenge (Bunshichi Tawara). I was embarrassed to have not placed Kappei Yamaguchi as Johnny, as he is a hugely prolific voice actor, and another one of my favourites.


Despite not really answering the questions it set up for itself, A Wind Named Amnesia is an interesting and engaging thought experiment, which is what I want from a post-apocalyptic offering. It is comfortingly vicious and bloody in places, and features some, arguably, justified dramatic nudity and a sex(ual) scene which I’m sure would have pleased my younger self (he was very interested in the artistic use of nudity. ARTISTIC).

Good film.

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