Penguin's Memory: A Tale of Happiness (1985) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Erika ★★★★

  It's kind of amazing how an anime movie starring penguins covers the topic of PTSD with more subtlety than movies like American Sniper

• Review by Cian Mulligan ★★★★½ 3

  Paris, Texas with penguins.

  Why is this one of the most intimate and human portrayals of PTSD I’ve ever come across? So much better than it has and right to be, beautiful animation, assisted by a comforting soundtrack and memorable characters.

  The 10 minute sequence of Mike hopelessly wandering from place to place wearily searching for any signs of significance or meaning in his life is one of the most emotionally powerful and enigmatically touching scenes in the history of animation.

• Review by Daniel Shillito ★★★★

  Man, the Penguins of Club Penguin were hit hard when their island was shut down.

• Review by Mike ★★★½ 4

  This is a war movie dealing with PTSD.....with penguins....and it's surprisingly good...who would've thought. Seriously, this is much better than what I expected.

• Review by louferrigno ★★★★ 1

  For Bri McArthur

  One of the major alcoholic beer producers in Japan is Suntory, a company lucrative enough in its business to reach out through other forms of art to promote their beverages. Besides opening up their own art museum, the business have teamed up with various visionaries like Square Enix for specialized Final Fantasy drinks, The Carpenters for a then-new brand of soft drinks, and even Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola during their partnership in making Kagemusha (some of you may already be familiar with the brand, since this last promotion was the influence for the plot of Lost in Translation through Bill Murray making a Suntory commercial in Japan). One of the odder, yet immensely successful promos…

• Review by PlaguDocta ★★★

  Japanuary 2022

  The beak contained the simple heart of reattachment. Even when this is backdropped with it's titular animals, told through a generic, straightforward and weirdly-paced manner, it will always remind us of the charm of replacing human characters with talking animals, placing them in what could look like absurd-looking events; no matter what, this will still fill the eyes of many, where eyes turn to hearts, softly filling a cute tenderness within (even when said cuteness only remains simple and just charming for me, one to only appreciate).

• Review by mdfmdf ★★★★ 1

  A Suntory beer promo starring its penguin mascot, cast here as a traumatized, shame-filled Vietnam War veteran

  The dream gig of a commercial artist - being given an assignment so throwaway that nobody in corporate will notice if you turn it into something really personal and weird. I don't think those jobs exist anymore

  This is a better movie than Coming Home

• Review by june whitehouse 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  CHICO DIDN'T DESERVE THAT

• Review by Zane ★★★★★ 4

  Incredible, the f*ckin Club Penguin ass beer commercial movie is imbued with deep emotions and nuance that hit deep in ways I couldn't have expected.

  I was walking into this worried this'd be a "wages of war" film judging by the synopsis, but instead it just uses that as a jumping off point towards a very nuanced study of alienation (maturely presented without solipsism) and gettin back in tune with yourself to open up to others (ala I'll Be Seeing You).

  It's very understated in both its animation (the warm laserdisc rip couldnt help but remind me of the similarly warm hazy imagery of Bobby's Girl, another beautiful underrated OVA with a good bit of overlap in appeal imo) and…

• Review by Noah Thompson ★★★

  Why does only the dream I've lost look beautiful?

  A movie that begins with attack helicopters flying over the trees of a jungle, the light of firing bullets being the only thing that illuminates the night. Eventually, a figure in the jungle appears, rifle in its hand, and it's... an adorable penguin. Penguin's Memory: A Tale of Happiness is an odd film both in concept and in execution. On one hand, it's hard to take some of its moments seriously. This is a feature-length animated feature that's focused PTSD and how love helps people work through trauma, and it just so happens to be told with humans replaced with penguins. There are multiple sequences throughout the film that clash with…

• Review by mattheus 🌱 ★★★★★ 1

  Considering how stigmatized mental health is in Japan, this is actually a really important film. I want to say the 5 star rating is a meme, but I actually love this film. Please watch it if you have the time, it's on youtube for freeeeeee.

• Review by Lizzy ★★★★½

  The epilogue to Apocalypse Noot. YouTube comments have already touted this as the submission from 'Club Penguin' for Vietnam war cinema, but to call it a Vietnam movie is only reducing it to muddy, waterlogged, viciously American history. If anything, it's a beautiful summertime tapestry of all the circumambience around wartime, not solely its status as a period of time for all parties but also a cultural moment that recolored the way we love, fear, indulge, and participate in society. For once, PTSD is treated less as a volatile bogeyillness and more as a condition where time becomes linked with grief, the past being readjusted into painful outlines and the present being splashed with traces of the past. All we really know is that nothing will ever be the same. Its beer commercial roots are clear, because movies are rarely so intoxicating.