Someone in another thread mentioned
"A Wind Named Amnesia" as a post-apoc anime. Since I knew it was at the local vid store, I picked it up yesterday and watched it last night.
The animation was farily decent quality, and the basic premise was pretty interesting, but the story pretty much went down hill.
The basic idea is that a wind has come along and swept away everyone's memories. Everything. How to drive cars, how to speak. One person has been re-eductaed and spends his time travelling around with a strange lady who also seems to have her memories intact. They are being pursued by a killing robot.
When you find out *why* everyone forgot, you'll go "you've *got* to be kidding!" Like much anime, it tries to be well thought out and creative, unfortunately, if you stop to consider it, you'll realze it's just being cruel and senseless, and pretty darn stupid too, in it's motivations.
*spoilers*
Stop reading now if you want to discover it all for yourself
OK, the basic premise is that aliens realize that mankind is about to embark on space travel, so to make sure man is safe to let out into the galaxy, the inflict the "amnesia wind" on mankind, just to see what kind of people we are.
That's the basic flaw. The idea that by completly reducing humans to basically primitive savages, you can somehow determine what sort of galatic citizens they will be. A simple look at Maslow's hiearchy will show you that you can't really develop any sort of nobility or 'humanity' if you simply fighting for basic survival. By reducing humans to simple survival of the fittest, you're undoing thousands of years of trial and error and learning and sharing and growing. You've destroyed civilization, and then try to determine from that if humans are civilized. Not only is in pretty vicious and cruel on the aliens part (who are portrayed as the 'wise' and 'advanced' race in the movie), it's also extremely stupid because you've done all this and won't really learn anything useful. The sad part is that if we are 'found worthy', the aliens will restore our memories, like that make it all better. Funny they don't promise to restore all the destroyed lives and dead victims of their little experiment
A couple of times, the movie attempts to show semi-societies existing in this world (the group that worships the land moving equipment, and the two people living in the "Eternal City") This is an intersting idea, and reminded me a bit of "Watership Down" in using different rabbit warrens to explore different kinds of human societies. However it falls short in that it only really deals with two ideas, and then fast forwards through a travel montage to the end.
The robot: Just what the heck was this all about? It seemed to be totally senseless. A first Sophia claims it's run amok, in which case the fact the it single mindly pursues them from California to New York makes no sense (since it seemed to be simply wiping ou tbinds of humans it found random;y until Wataru shot it up). However it's fairly evident it's being controlled from space, either aliens or other humans. Since the robot knows Wataru's name, it can probably only be being directed by the aliens. It's persuit of Wataru then makes no sense. If the aliens are trying to dicover something about humans through Wataru, why are they aslo apparently very hard trying to kill him. All along, the robot is played up to be something sinister and ulterior, and it never comes to anything and doesn't really have any sensible motivation. It seems more of "through an adversary in to get some action" and almost serves more of a red-herring to make the audience look one way when nothing's there. And just how the heck did the robot persue them across several states and hundreds of miles, always about a quarter mile behind, with nobody stopping for gasoline, or food, or anything. They should've skipped the travel montage, and probably the robot all together, and spent more time exploring different places they came along.
Why did Johnny still have his memories, as well? Unless Johnny was an alien like Sophia, intentionally setting up Wataru for the great experiment.
All in all, the reasoning for the aliens was misplaced, the results of their experiment was brutal, and a lot of things along they way made no sense and were never explained.
