It’s the near future, and humanoid androids exist somehow. Where did they come from? How long have they existed? What are the social and cultural repercussions of their existence among human society? Hey, you, shut up. What actually matters is that the android production company SA Corp has revolutionized the android market by creating Giftias, the most advanced androids ever made! They’re more human-like and emotionally articulate than the older models, but this comes with an unfortunate cost. The technology that gives these advanced androids their advantages has a lifespan of less than ten years, and once that time is up, they degrade, and become Wanderers, making them both violent and unpredictable. Thus, SA Corp has created branches of retrievers, whose job is to go out and collect expiring Giftias so they can be put down humanely. Also they employ Giftias as part of this operation, and bland, generic MC number 581 has been paired with one of them! Will they fall in love?

For Plastic Memories, we’re returning to Doga Kobo, a production company that has been around in some form or another for around fifty years, but only really started to produce anime around 2007, and they’ve only become more prolific over time. They’ve gone from producing one anime per year to at least four or five, and some of their titles have been extremely well known and well received, especially recently with the success of Oshi no Ko. Having said that, their output over the years has been inconsistent in terms of quality, putting out several gorgeous masterpieces like Oshi no Ko, as well as some poorly funded shoestring budget nightmares like Majestic Prince. For context, this is the studio that produced the entire Koihime Musou franchise, and as much as I love that show... For the record, I adore Koihime Musou... It is not a good looking anime. I haven’t seen most of their titles, as is the case with almost all production companies in the anime medium, but they span the entire animation quality spectrum.

For Plastic Memories, it’s kind of a mixed bag, and in this case, I unfortunately do not mean mixed-to-positive. The first few episodes range at any point from solid to passable, but it really does seem like the budget might have dried up from the fourth episode onward, because things just get stiffer and stiffer as the series rolls on. The background artwork is really nice, and it can be highly immersive and intricately detailed, but the characters interacting on top of them, for most of the series, look like mannequins only moving a little at a time when it’s time for them to talk or react to something someone else says. I’d like to say that you’d have to be looking for how cheap the animation is in order to notice it, but that’s not true, it gets absurdly noticeable right out of nowhere. The scenes are usually well lit and well directed enough for it to never become too distracting, but you will notice it, and often, whether it distracts you or not.

The design work, for the most part, is more or less okay. Most of the cast looks fairly generic, from the main character who looks so indescribably identical to every romantic comedy main character in anime history, to his child-like waifu love interest whose design I’ve definitely seen before. They both look bland and generic, but they don’t look bad, so if they appeal to you, cool. The rest of the androids who are working for SA CORP look fine, with an appealing color palette, and a few gentle pastel hair colors that don’t stick out too much. One thing that really did bother me about the visuals is about when a Giftia becomes a wanderer... The way they move changes to something more primal and demonic, and I have to say, they look really silly when this happens. I was hoping for something more uncanny and disturbing like corrupted, distorted human movements, but no, they practically become wendigos. It also happens way too quickly, as they basically just snap and go all murder-hobo.

My journey with Plastic Memories began in a way that’s become pretty predictable for me over the last few years: It was a popular title that was being thrown around as a heartfelt masterpiece a long time ago, and I missed it, primarily because I don’t keep up with seasonal anime, but also because it was never dubbed and I never came across it for a good sale price. I then kind of randomly added it to my Re:Solution watch list, and voila, I finally watched the series. I do this a lot, it’s probably not the right way to watch anime, but it works for me. Anyway, I finally watched the show, and right off the bat, it wound up intriguing me on two levels, both of which might as well be considered tropes of mine, as much as these two levels have appeared throughout my 287 anime reviews. First level is, I have a bad track record with so-called tear-jerker anime, and I’ve wound up ripping no small amount of them to shreds over the years, so it’s pretty rare(but not impossible) for me to find one that affects me the same way it affects the majority.

The second level is, and I know I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but I love when an anime presents me with a unique idea, and then explores the fuck out of it. Sure enough, when I watched the first episode, I immediately felt like both of these itches were about to be scratched. The concept was intriguing; Artififically intelligent homunculi were being collected by the government to be decommissioned humanely before they broke down and went out of control. Not only is this an idea that is absolutely ripe for expansion and fleshing out, but there was more than enough evidence that the story was going to have a powerful emotional core tied into people having to say their tearful goodbyes to their expiring Giftias... No, their dying family members... And the second it was mentioned that Isla was a veteran who had retired from active duty, I knew this element of the story was going to become personal at some point. Themes of loss, coping, trauma, recovery, all of this was just sitting on the table. This first episode wasn’t just great, it was fucking transcendant, and it set my expectations high.

The second and third episodes weren’t quite as strong or striking, but I was still on board. I felt like they did a decent job fleshing out what the job of a Giftia Retriever was like, and I enjoyed the comedy, with Isla frustratingly trying to convince an old lady to let them collect her Giftia grandchild. There’s a scene where Isla tries to vault off of a balcony to catch a pair of runners, and she faceplants three stories into a dumpster, and I would KILL to have a gif of this moment, it was so funny. Then we got the fourth episode, which introduced an orphan with a Giftia big sister, and I’m not going to say he wasn’t believable, but holy shit this little brat was annoying. He was willing to part with her, but since the particular Retriever department that Tsukasa joined is concerned primarily with the emotional well-being of the people they’re dealing with, they still had to spend time unravelling his issues, which, okay, fine... I don’t like it, but I’ll take it. I was still on board, and it’s not like good shows can’t have a couple of bad episodes. Bento, Kotoura-san, and both FMA series all had a couple of stinkers.

Then they introduced black market retrievers, and that’s where my first red flag came in. I’m not mad that the little boy got tricked... I probably would have made the same mistake at his age... But why do black market retrievers exist? What’s their business model? They pose as retrievers to abduct retiring Giftias, for what purpose? Who could they possibly sell that too? If they’re trying to harvest organs, wouldn’t it be safer to abduct them a few years earlier? Why is degrading technology such a hot item? Who the hell is running this organization, the fucking underpants gnomes? None of this shit is ever explained, which clued me into the fact that maybe, just maybe, this idea hasn't been entirely thought through, and since we don’t get THAT much infirmation about this world or even the culture surrounding Giftias beyond this point, it opens up a lot of uncomfortable questions about the way they work and the people who live with them.

What do we learn about Giftias, just by observing the ones working for SA Corp? Well, they have minds of their own. They’re intelligent, and have both emotions and agency. They can express their own opinions. Their bodies are anatomically correct enough that they can eat, drink, use the bathroom and feel pain. They’re capable of romantic feelings. We also learn from a client later on that you can keep their bodies and just replace their AI cores, essentially putting a new soul into the same body. They also never age, and since one of the Giftias was sold as a bodyguard to the fucking yakuza, we know that they’re not just limited to family replacements, and there probably isn’t much of a background check required to own one. Giftias working for SA Corp do seem to have much more agency and personal freedom than any of the Giftias that they get sent out to decommission, but that doesn’t feel like an intentional detail, that just feels like the writer not thinking too hard about the consistency of this world.

So with all of this in mind, let me pose a scenario to you. What’s to stop a pedophile from buying a child Giftia, and then just keeping her as his eternally childlike waifu that will never grow up, just replacing her AI every nine or so years while he molests her every day for the rest of his life? What’s to stop people from buying Giftia, and then turning around to exploit them in other ways? Slave labor, prostitution, human trafficking? Do Giftias have rights? Are they protected? Are they considered people? They have a lot in common with Persocoms, and not only was Chi used in a peep show once, but the Chobits manga made several references to people fucking their persocoms, so where’s the line with Giftias? Can they get married? Own property? Can they pretend to be human? Can they protest, speak up for the rights of their brethren, advocate for new legislation? Or here’s another question I really want answered... We know from the old lady who kept replacing her little girl’s AI that she’s done this a few times, so Giftias have definitely existed for at least thirty years now.

Why hasn't technology improved in that time? Why haven’t they figured out a way to make Giftias last longer? Yeah, I know, technology doesn’t work that way... Pretty much everything you own is designed to fail at some point so the money you pour into repairs and replacements can keep the economy alive. You need a new smartphone every year, you need a new car about every ten to fifteen years, blah, blah blah. Here’s the problem, though... Giftias are sentient. They’re intelligent and self-aware. With as many of them as there are implied to be, you can not convince me that at no point has a single one of them ever gone the HAL-9000 route and rebelled against those who wished to shut them down, and I don’t mean just fruitlessly running away with their owners. Has any Giftia ever refused to accept their fate, on their own recognizance? Either embracing the fate of becoming a Wanderer, or becoming fucking scientists and trying to invent a way to stay alive, or find some technological improvement to the current product. Or hell, as long as Giftias have been around, what has their competition been up to? That’s the shit that I want to see.

Instead, most of this series is dedicated to being one of the most interminably boring, excruciatingly unfunny romantic comedy anime I’ve ever seen. There are hints at a possible harem, with a few female characters falling in love with the most vanilla protagonist to ever sport a punchable face, messy brown hair and a cowlick, but he eventually locks in on Isla... For some reason? I’ll admit that because I’m asexual, I have difficulty engaging with fictional romances that don’t make sense to me, and maybe I’m the odd one out here, but their romance felt completely arbitrary to me. They were partnered up, he made efforts to get her out of her shell, then he tried dating her, then out of nowhere that catapults them into being in love with each other, and the whole time I can’t help but wonder if the same thing would have happened with ANY Giftia they’d paired him up with, and it’s not like there’s anything interesting or unique about their dynamic. There’s a scene where he asks to have dinner with her, and she responds with “Will that make you happy?” And I felt like that SHOULD have been a commentary about how the subservient nature of Giftias affected their romance, but no, I could just tell it wasn’t anything that self aware, just the same old sexist bullshit from most anime romcoms.

Anyway, since their romance didn’t work for me, you can imagine how difficult the rest of the series was to get through, you can imagine how disappointing it was to see them almost completely abandon the original concept in favor of exploring a boring, tedious romance that was leading to a tragedy porn ending that was so obvious right from the beginning that you can’t even consider it a spoiler. Like, remember Your Lie In April? Spoiler warning for THAT series, but the main love interest dies in the end, and not only is that supposed to be a huge tragic twist, but her entire backstory and her reasoning for keeping her motivations and true feelings a secret were a part of the twist, and none of that shit worked for me, because I figured out every single detail of the twist before episode five. Why is that important here? Because by every metric, that twist was still executed better than the one in Plastic Memories. I mean sure, I respect how it ultimately ended, by sticking to its guns rather than relying on some bullshit last minute asspull, but respect doesn’t necessarily equal enjoyment.

I don’t know, maybe I should have thrown my thoughts about this show’s attempt at a tragic ending behind a spoiler tag, but come on, you can not tell me you didn’t predict that shit early. I do think it was a smart choice to reveal what the remainder of Isla’s lifespan when they did, as they really weren’t fooling anyone and they were better off owning it early than trying to treat the viewers like morons, but there were so many other bafflingly stupid decisions made throughout the series, and a lot of them revolve around that ending. There were multiple points where I wondered aloud why other characters weren’t asking what her lifespan was. For another huge example, literally the only moment in this series that surprised me at all was when it was revealed that the tsundere character(she has a name, but who cares) didn’t know Isla was dying. Fuck you. Given how long she’d been involved in some way with SA Corp, and knowing how long Giftias live, she HAD to know at least most of Isla’s life was used up, so the fact that her ignorance was motivating her to encourage Tsukasa’s romance with Isla is distressingly idiotic.

This show has no wit. It has no self awareness. It has just enough maturity to not humiliate itself at the last minute, but that is minimal praise at best. Not only does it completely neglect its own concept, and refuse to flesh out its own world, but it operates in such a way that you almost feel mean thinking about all of that on your own. Like, I’m just sitting here making connections in my head, pointing out all of these questions and implications, and Plastic Memories is just sitting in the corner sniffling to itself saying “Aw, come on, that’s unfair...” Like i’m committing an act of cruelty and betrayal by doing the writer’s fucking job for him. Probably worst of all is the fact that, when you really think about the lifespan of a Giftia, Tsukasa is technically dating a nine year old. Maybe I’m reading too much into things here, but he isn’t helping his case when he says that one of the things he loves about her is that she’s so short. For that reason alone, maybe it’s a good thing that their romance is completely sexless and sterile, and their one and only kiss happens just off-screen.

Plastic Memories is out of print from Aniplex, which means physical copies were wildly overpriced even when they were still in stock. You can still stream it on Crunchyroll, however. A manga adaptation and a video game are not available stateside.

I am legitimately pissed off at how much potential this series squandered. When I saw that first episode, I was floored by it, and even three episodes in, I was thinking that this series had some genuine 10/10 potential. From there, I haven’t seen an anime take a nosedive in quality this fast since Aldnoah Zero, but at least that series had the excuse of having an amazing director behind its first three episodes before peacing out and leaving the rest in someone else’s hands. For a show that seemed early on like it was going to wow me on two very important levels, it ultimately failed me on both. It underperforms both as a tearjerker, and as a high-concept science fiction story, and as cool a concept as it was, it deserved better than this.

I give Plastic Memories a 3/10