There’s no better way to spend a Saturday night as a twenty-something than watching animated penguins cope with trauma. No, I wasn’t spending the first Saturday night of Pride Month 2025 revisiting Happy Feet or some shabbily animated adaptation of bleak Surf’s Up fan fiction. Instead, I was absorbing the 1985 Shinji Kimura directorial effort, Penguin's Memory: Shiawase Monogatari or Penguin’s Memory: A Tale of Happiness. This hand-drawn animated feat concerns animated penguins (who sure do look a lot like they would’ve had a ball at Club Penguin) grappling with wartime PTSD, strained familial bonds, and difficulties building emotional connections.
This sounds like a fever dream, the kind of movie prime for ceaseless mentions in shitposting cinema-based groups. This dark meditation on psychological turmoil stars protagonists originating as mascots for the Suntory beer company. That sounds as primed for cinematic success as Geico gecko headlining a somber drama about the opioid crisis. Sometimes, though, life tosses you a wonderful surprise. Penguin's Memory: Shiawase Monogatari defies all odds to become a captivatingly intimate drama with absorbing (not to mention adorable) characters.
Protagonist penguin Mike (Koichi Sato) served in the fictional Delta War. However, a prologue set in this battlefield heavily leans on Vietnam War imagery ripped straight from Platoon or Apocalypse Now. It’s behind enemy lines that we meet the poetry-fixated Mike, who's just trying to survive with fellow soldiers Al and Tom. Here, Kimura establishes the raw and quiet aesthetic of Penguin’s Memory. Modern adult-skewing America features like Sausage Party or America: The Motion Picture craft their entire aesthetics around the “shock value” of animated characters. There aren’t any deeper characters or themes within these titles. It’s all as deep as the “novelty” of seeing animated figures say the F-word and smoke weed.
Meanwhile, Penguin’s Memory launches right into penguins holding gigantic guns and firing into the night at enemies. We’re not supposed to laugh at this material. The point isn’t the “wacky” novelty of cartoon penguins acting like people, but rather the psychological situations they navigate. Instantly, Penguin’s Memory beckons viewers to get as emotionally invested in these critters as Kimura and company clearly are. This works like a charm, as this in media res approach immediately makes Mike and company underdogs we can care about. Pausing during this prologue for a quiet fireside chat between Mike and Tom also establishes Penguin’s lovely, unhurried dialogue-driven storytelling method. This stretch of the runtime also reveals the ensuing feature’s prevailing moral complexity through a moment where the three penguins stumble on local citizens wearily transporting themselves to safety.
Once helicopters from Mike’s side of the war appear, these crafts don’t suddenly inspire hope and joy. Instead, they open fire on unarmed civilians and small children. In all the chaos, Tom and Al lose their lives, with the former character’s aching demise (told with just his wailing screams on the soundtrack and no orchestral music accompaniment), especially leaving a mark. Penguin’s Memory effortlessly incorporates several key storytelling components and an emotionally absorbing aesthetic instantly in this brief prologue. It’s a fantastic tease for the larger story, which begins with Mike returning home to America with his arm in a cast and mind stuck on all the violence he’s witnessed. His relatives and neighbors yearn to hear gory war stories. Mike, though, knows all too well the Hell that transpired over there.
Penguin’s Memory’s exceedingly simple character designs (concerning chubby penguins often wearing no clothes) are perfect for realizing Mike’s bottled-up angst. That little blank stare of his is cute, but there’s also a haunting nebulousness to him. His streamlined appearance and facial expressions work beautifully, communicating how he’s a shell of his former self. Striking images of Mike (after he leaves home to become a drifter), solemnly staring outside from a railcar or wandering down a sidewalk aimlessly, have such poignancy thanks to this facet. You can spend all the money you want on excessively realistic Lion King animation. None of those critters will ever have the vivid humanity of the unabashedly cartoony and impressively simple accomplishments of Mike from Penguin’s Memory.
These character designs really shine thanks to the production’s willingness to eschew dialogue for certain sequences. Mike leaving home in the middle of the night, complete with leaving a locket for his little sister, is one gut-wrenching segment made extra powerful by the absence of dialogue. Removing an orchestral score for stretches of the Delta War prologue, meanwhile, accentuates the emotional immediacy of this segment. Viewers feel like they’re also huddled around a campfire with these penguins. There’s also an interesting lack of music in early scenes depicting the bond between Mike and his pet bird Chicho, which similarly underscores the verisimilitude of their connection. Their quiet pet/owner bond is especially moving within these streamlined confines since it lets viewers appreciate how Mike is cracking the shell of experiencing violence through taking care of another living being.
Understanding when to dial back music and verbal communication just makes Penguin’s Memory’s most impactful auditory elements, like Jill’s singing or a mournful harmonica on the soundtrack, so unforgettable. Shinji Kimura’s sharp visual sensibilities are especially apparent in starkly haunted images of a haunted Mike just sitting at a booth or exiting a courthouse as snow falls. The distorted nature of Delta War images in the climax (not to mention the impeccable cuts between the past and present) are yet another mesmerizing visual touch.
Heck, even the choice of centering this story around cuddling-looking penguins reflects Penguin’s Memory’s thoughtful imagery. Mike and Jill existed as penguins long before this movie as beer mascots. That’s the plan and the simple reason why they look so adorable here. However, as a standalone piece of art, there’s something powerful about Penguin’s Memory using these animals to explore concepts like trauma and complicated familial dynamics. In the real world, anyone can grapple with mental health problems. It’s not just limited to people who “look depressed” or one economic group.
Emphasizing the humanity and vulnerability of penguins that look ready-made for a Saturday morning cartoon reflects this reality. One glance at Mike, Jill, and their friends and you’d assume they’d never suffer from real-world woes. But much like in reality, appearances are deceiving. Everyone’s fighting an internal war you cannot comprehend. Penguin’s Memory dares to uncover deep pathos from unexpected sources and characters. It succeeds tremendously thanks to its irony-free storytelling, visuals, and voice acting approach. This is a film deeply conscious of how hard it is to untangle the past from our present, as well as how pearls of wisdom can come from anyone (including romantic rivals). That wisdom soaks into the nuanced character interactions and Mike's messy handling of his psychological turmoil.
In the process, a film full of talking penguins stuck in an undetermined time period (the film’s technology and automobiles are intentionally pulled from different decades) resonates as achingly true. This feature uses animation so effectively to reinforce how internal struggles exist everywhere and within everyone.
Mike’s pain captured my heart and enraptured me in a completely unreal world. It doesn't hurt that Penguin’s Memory also thrives as a glorious visual exercise. The various backgrounds, for instance, are absolutely gorgeous. More naturalistic backdrops especially look outstanding. Meanwhile, delightful touches like how all the penguins straight-up waddle everywhere are both entertaining and a lovely reminder of how committed this production is to embracing its penguin-centric nature. This is not a tale of penguins who exclusively walk and behave like humans. These are penguins that waddle their chubby forms everywhere, gosh darn it!
An early musical number introducing Jill as she romps across a grassy hill with various kids she watches over also exudes tremendous self-confidence. Why not have a catchy tune in your dark movie about wartime trauma? It’s such a vibrant way to introduce one of Penguin’s Memory’s most important characters, not to mention a vivid suggestion of how different Jill’s psyche is from Mike’s. It’s hard to imagine the latter character ever humming, let alone engaging in a full-blown musical number. That just makes their eventual romantic bond extra transfixing to witness. Between Penguin’s Memory and Better Man, perhaps the recipe for compelling cinema is telling weighty material through talking animated animals and embracing flashy musical number digressions.
I love cinema because it’s always full of surprises. You never know what amazing film you’ll discover next. Penguin's Memory: Shiawase Monogatari is one of the best and most affecting surprises I’ve encountered in eons. Deftly combining buoyant musical numbers with such gripping explorations of post-war psychological turmoil is one of the many ways Penguin's Memory: Shiawase Monogatari astonishes. Who knew bittersweet scenes of an animated penguin doctor espousing soliloquies about sentimentality and love against an autumn backdrop could work so extraordinarily well?
So many scenes in this feature sound like total boondoggles on paper, yet work so miraculously in execution. Constant creative chutzpah, palpable love for these animated birds, and glorious visuals (have I mentioned how cute those character designs are?) turn Penguin's Memory: Shiawase Monogatari into a must-see proposition. If these beer mascots could anchor something so affecting, maybe we should let the Geico gecko headline that opioid drama after all…