4 Star

Full Lives are Cut Short.

From the director of the popular anime Sword Art Online, Attack on Titan and New Game!, director Yoshiyuki Fujiwara delivers the writings of Naotaka Hayashi (Steins;Gate (Video Game)) and brings us a heart warming and on the other side of the coin a heart wrenching story that only the Japanese can deliver.

The eighteen year old Tsukasa Mizugaki (Yasuaki Takumi, Snow White with the Red Hair, Ben-To, Durarara!!) has failed his college entrance exams so he has to find a job. As always, it isn’t what you know but who you know and he finds himself with a new job with the Global company SAI in the Terminal Service Department.

Plastic Memories is set in the future where androids are common, but the androids of SAI are a separate entity as they are indistinguishable from humans. They have an artificial soul (Giftia’s) so they can store memories, but only for their life span of 81,920 hours (9 years 4 months) after which their memories of who they were deteriorate very quickly. So they must be collected and deactivated before this occurs or they become the very dangerous ‘Wanderers’.

Tsukasa finds out that his new job isn’t in the plush office building but round the back where the Terminal Service Department have a small office manned by the boss Takao Yamanobe (Nobuo Tobita, Naruto: Shippuden, Durarara!!x2, Your Lie in April), the real boss Kazuki Kuwanomi (Megumi Toyoguchi, Fullmetal Alchemist, Black Lagoon, Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail), Michiru Kinushima (Chinatsu Akasaki, Sword Art Online: Alternative Gun Gale Online, Fate/Zero), Ren Kawarake (Shinnosuke Ogami, High School DxD, Attack on Titan), Zack (Sayuri Yahagi, Assassination Classroom, The Girl Who Leapt Through Space), Constance (Satoshi Hino, Black Butler, Boruto: Naruto the Movie), Yasutaka Hanada (Kenjirô Tsuda, Space Dandy, Tiger & Bunny: The Rising), Sherry (Aimi Terakawa, Luck & Logic) and finally our Isla the white haired Giftia, once the best retrieval operative of the SAI (Sora Amamiya, Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo Ghoul: Root A, Tokyo Ghoul: re).

“There is only one thing you have to keep in mind.

You will never feel rewarded for what you do.

That’s because our job is to rip apart memories.”

The Terminal Service Department are the people and Giftia responsible for the retrieval and decommissioning of the end of life Giftia’s. The teams are made up of one human as a spotter and a Giftia as a marksman that goes into the negotiations with the other Giftia owners, as they have to give their written consent for the retrieval and some customers are more compliant than others.

“As long as I’m working, even I have reason for existing.”

The teams in the office are Michiru the manic redhead (H) and Zack (G) who looks like a young boy, Kazuki the flame haired dominant force of the TSD (H) and Constance with blue hair (G), the philandering Yasutaka (H) and the raven haired Sherry (G) and the newby Tsukasa (H) and the very experienced Isla (G). This is their story of day to day life in the TSD and how the new boy on the block learns how to fit into this team and his feelings for his partner and how he deals with the job at hand.

Plastic Memories is an emotional highway as your heart sings and sinks with the revelations of the TSD.

Plastic memories is available as a collectors Blu-ray

Extras/Episodes:

Episodes 1-7 on Blu-Ray
Collector’s Slipcase
Staff and Cast talk sessions
Web previews