A Wind Named Amnesia

• Directed by Kazuo Yamazaki
• December 22, 1990

Voice Cast

• Wataru-Adam Henderson
• Sophia-Denica Fairman
• Johnny-Ben Fairman as Lee Tyler
• Lisa-Barbara Barnes as Susie Baker
• Mr. Simpson-Peter Marinker
• Little John-Bob Sessions
• Sue-Annemarie Lawless

After a mysterious gust of wind gives all humans amnesia, a rehabilitated young man and mysterious woman travel across a ravaged America.

I often find movies that pique my interest in one way or another through social media. A Wind Named Amnesia was one of them. The premise sounded interesting and the animation looked good if not great. After viewing while the animation held up, I was left wanting when it came to so much else in the film.

Those that made this clearly were aiming for an animated analysis of society and human development. Fine but an excess of empty, superficial talking leading to very shallow analysis is not the way. It is like rich atheists living in a bubble tried to talk broadly about society and theology yet they do not engage with those outside their immediate circle nor would they step inside any religious structure to have a full perspective. Instead the chose to rely on what others may have said or they simply felt was evident but was simply bias or assumption.

Due to the universal amnesia humanity is almost bestial yet has complex religious beliefs with one priest/cleric able to operate (and presumably maintain) a complex piece of construction equipment. This religion has prescribed rituals and rules that must be followed with enough to it that there is a communicated reason why young women must be sacrificed, and those women often do so willingly. That takes communication and the best people can do in the movie is grunt and shout.

Our two mains stumble across two people living in a city run by a supercomputer whose job was to take care of everybody in the city. It was somehow affected by this mighty wind, but the computer back up in a previously encountered character was not? That implant was the whole reason he could do anything! Consistency folks.

Anywho, it went a little crazy before eventually repairing itself though not after it killed a bunch of people and there were only like two individuals left whom it download the memories of all the deceased inhabitants into so it would have a broad population to take care of. I have no idea how that makes sense. This incident occurred after the wind so if this wind wiped everyone’s memories, then there should be no memories for it to download into those two people. And if there are memories to download from the dead, it would mean the memories of the living are blocked and not erased so a cure is possible. Nobody picks up on this though. Unless when the wind broke it could tell the difference between the living and the dead.

A rehabilitated man named Wataru is more an observer while his eventual companion Sophia provides the commentary. Wataru may have only been slightly rehabilitated but finding the badly evasive Sophia with intact memories should raise concerns. A Wind Named Amnesia is not about Wataru trying to find the cause of the wind or find a way to reverse it. The former is unnecessary and the latter doesn’t seem to really matter. Ultimately his goal is to travel and show people how to be better? Not sure. 

We do get an answer about what caused the wind to rip and wipe away memories. Aliens. Giorgio Tsoukalos would have guessed that! Why? On the one hand they believe our limited excursions into outer space make us a threat to them. They can wipe out memories and we can barely get to the moon but we’re a threat. Sure, Jan. On the other they said they wanted us to be happy but making us savages lacking complex thought and giving into baser desires and impulses. That quite possibly might be the stupidest reason for any action I’ve heard in any movie.

People needing to take medicine to live will not know they must. Those that make them will no longer know how. Nobody will have the ability to survive in harsher climates of extreme cold or extreme heat. Rather than farming to raise food and feed numerous people, humanity will be pushed to weaponless hunting and scavenging until somebody figures out the basics again and is able to pass the knowledge on. These were not benevolent aliens. They were MONSTERS!

Mixed in this is a subplot of a mech still running on its own that’s chasing after Wataru which goes nowhere. Seriously. I don’t think it even factors into the climax. It looks like it’s going to be coming after him and then I don’t know what happened to it. It did offer up a rather dark moment because it is still running on automation since the pilot inside has been dead because he forgot how to get out. More compassion from those aliens.

Human actions are counterintuitive. We first meet a man protecting a young girl from sacrifice but she turns herself back in after running because of tribal safety. Then the girl they save from the computer runs back to be with pops though he will have no idea who she is and she the same. Why not try to save him?

I think the biggest sin for me is that the only spaceship we see at the end is just a rip off of the spaceship scene in John Carpenter’s classic Starman. In a movie that makes no sense and thinks too much of itself, it’s a step too far for me.

With a desire to be more philosophical than tell a good story that expresses some philosophy, A Wind Named Amnesia will make you beg for that wind to put it out of your mind. It looks pretty but beyond that is forgettable. It blew.