Completed in 7 Episodes: The Chinese 2D Animation Destined to Be This Year's Most Unforgettable

“Even though memories naturally fade and distort, animation offers another possibility of ‘preservation.’”

The animated series Memory Administration Bureau officially concluded on bilibili on August 30, bringing down the curtain on this dream of memory that spanned six years.

The series tells the story of the protagonist Guan Chao, who, in order to return to the past, searches for “Burning Stone,” the energy source needed to activate the time gun, only to unexpectedly enter the Memory Administration Bureau. Over the month since the series began airing, its plot, characters, and animation have sparked round after round of lively discussion among anime fans.

While these discussions occasionally sparked controversy, almost no one would question the creative team’s complete inheritance of the spirit of the original short film from six years ago, or their courage to keep thinking in their creation and expression and preserve their authorship despite the pressures of commercialization and production schedules. This sincere spirit of independent creation carved out, by sheer force, an inviolable plot of land for itself under the extremely cramped conditions in which Chinese 2D animation struggles to survive.

01 “Analog” Memory​

Memory is an ambiguous thing for human beings. It is a product of our sensory recording and secondary transcription of reality. Memory cannot replace reality, yet it is also a vital bond between human perception and the real world; how to balance memory and reality is a lesson one keeps learning throughout life.

The most distinctive feature of Memory Administration Bureau since its short-film days is that it concretizes, through its setting, the blurriness and ambiguity between memory and reality.

And in the series, I was delighted to find that the creators’ expression of the theme of “memory” was no longer confined to the setting and narrative text; instead, using different visual elements as media, they translated memory into something more perceivable.

Throughout the series version of Memory Administration Bureau, there runs a relentless pursuit of the texture of “analog media” (media systems that record, transmit, and reproduce information through continuously varying physical signals, such as film and tape, as opposed to digital media).

The pursuit of a “film look” is one of the show’s defining visual traits.

Compared to digital photography or reality itself, film photography is imperfect. The process from shooting to finished print is complex and cumbersome, and due to its own characteristics, the final images can deviate somewhat from the real scene. But it is precisely this imperfection that endows film photography with unique meaning—as if the temperature, humidity, and time of the moment of capture, even the mood of the recorder and the recorded, were all condensed into that imperfection. And film, existing as a physical object, makes the memory frozen in an instant feel almost within reach.

Memory Administration Bureau imitates this “imperfect” quality of film in its visual presentation. Every scene in the small town of Red Card Port glows with a sunset-like warm yellow, as if time and space here had stopped together with memory in the year 2000;

Flickering grain and noise fill the entire frame, making the image feel as though it carries temperature and humidity; the large white patches in the frame simulate overexposure in film photography, and around every overexposed patch—even including the linework—is wrapped a faint, orange-red halo unique to film. These details, as accents, give life to the frame as concretized memory.

In more extreme cases, Memory Administration Bureau even cuts in a few frames of live-action footage flashing by quickly, attempting to deepen the viewer’s perceptual confusion between the real and the virtual.

This imitation and use of analog media seems to signal the creative team’s attempt to weaken animation’s conventionality and connect the real with the virtual.

And just as memory can never truly equal or replace reality—in the age of all-digital animation, no matter how meticulous animation’s “imitation of analog media” is, it cannot transcend the limits of its own nature as a digital medium; yet in terms of the result, it can achieve the maximum degree of perceptual confusion.

In episode 5, the creators also put this speculative question before the audience through the Protagonist Halo’s line: “If you put a digital image transferred from film next to a digital image with a film filter, could you tell which one is film?”

What do “simulation and reproduction” truly mean? The creators buried this question within the exquisite imagery, leaving it for the audience to ponder. This keeps the visual presentation of Memory Administration Bureau consistent with the work’s inner expression of the concept of “memory.”

02 “Peering Into” Memory​

Perception differs depending on the stage of memory. Memory Administration Bureau divides its narrative structure into three spaces—the real world, the memory layer, and the Memory Administration Bureau representing the order of memory—and the element that visually distinguishes these three spaces is the aspect ratio.

The aspect ratio is like a window the image opens onto the real world; the size of the window frame determines the angle from which the viewer peers into the image. Memory Administration Bureau uses three different aspect ratios corresponding to the three spaces where the story takes place.

The different aspect ratios visually separate the three spacetimes at a glance, and also leave room for visual playfulness in the transitions between spaces.

Changes in aspect ratio make it easier for creators to steer the audience’s emotions. 16:9, as the standard ratio used at the opening, gives the audience a scale for perceiving rules, order, and reality at the story’s point of origin. Moreover, the creators portray Baizhong and Fangtang’s peering into Guan Chao’s memories as watching a movie—this both prepares for the later seamless shift from 16:9 to 4:3 and establishes the audience’s identity as absent observers.

Later plot developments reveal that the reality Guan Chao inhabits is not truly reality either. In episode 7, the thick black bars on either side of the 4:3 frame become a barrier that can be broken, shaking the audience’s identity as absent observers in an instant—and the enormous sensory imbalance brings with it a correspondingly enormous emotional impact.

The 16:9 and 4:3 ratios can interact and shift horizontally. By comparison, the space carried by the 2.35:1 ratio is relatively independent.

Under this ratio, you can regard the space presented on screen as a movie screen, or a theater stage. Whatever your perspective, the image’s quality of being watched is beyond dispute. This extremely clear positioning of the viewing experience lets the memory-layer segments serve, visually, narratively, and emotionally, as transitional filler between the Memory Administration Bureau and the reality portions.

Furthermore, the differences in aspect ratio also give viewers a chance to glimpse the creators’ intentions and understanding of the different spaces in the story.

The Memory Administration Bureau, in 16:9, is like an order of iron law. It is neither reality nor the mad private phantasm of an individual, but more like a set of established rules constructed within a world of illusion;

The 4:3 ratio carrying the story’s real world compresses the visual space on left and right, narrowing the field of view—seemingly mirroring the cramped, confined reality full of regret and loneliness that Guan Chao faces;

The 2.35:1 ratio, representing the memory layer’s environment, lends the fantasy world grandeur on the scale of cinema. Yet that splendor and brilliance are merely the swelling and distortion of protagonist Guan Chao’s intense obsession.

03 “Deconstructing” Memory​

If imitating the texture of analog media is memory made visually concrete, and manipulating the aspect ratio simulates the way memory is observed—then how can the mode of memory’s operation be reproduced?

How can the process of remembering, the retrieval of memory, even memory’s deviations and omissions, be structured—even deconstructed—through narrative and audiovisual means?

Memory is always divergent and disordered. To capture a specific memory, one usually needs to anchor it in a specific medium. Memory Administration Bureau’s presentation of memory likewise rests on pastiche of multiple media. This creative approach is concentrated in episodes 5 and 6.

In episode 5, the Protagonist Halo’s reconstruction of memory is achieved through an editing bench in a real theater. This dull tool that in reality only editors use becomes part of the narrative, forming one link in the staging’s playfulness and giving viewers a very concrete imaginative anchor for how memory operates.

In the same episode, Baizhong’s memory is also presented in the form of black-and-white comics. Through the creators’ deconstruction, the medium’s characteristics here follow the same line as the editing bench’s effect on memory.

The essence of comics is to break up and recombine a complete span of time and space through paneling, letting a sequence of static images operate on their own in the reader’s mind. This quality perfectly matches the power of the Protagonist Halo’s real theater—the ability to freely cut, collage, delete, or restructure memory.

At the same time, the actual viewing experience here is not entirely equivalent to reading a comic; it is more like an artificially created “force-played comic.” It retains the comic’s paneling, but strips the reader of the agency to turn pages, pause, or imagine within static images.

No matter how well the panel forms, speech bubbles, and screentone effects in the frame match the comic forms within the memory, they cannot replace the unique perception of actually reading a comic. By imitating the comic medium and letting animation’s medium characteristics clash against comics’, this segment gains a core of expression visually as weighty as its narrative one.

The same creative logic applies to the arcade-game structure nested within Guan Chao’s battle against the bug men in episode 6. Memory here is packaged as an immersive repetitive-experience simulator; Guan Chao’s struggle against memory trauma is concretely expressed through the arcade loop of failing, inserting coins, and starting over.

The video editing bench, comics, and arcade games—three media, each with its own characteristics, annotate the operation of memory from different angles in Memory Administration Bureau. In this process, the show demonstrates the manipulability of memory’s mechanisms—memory’s operation, though precise, is also extremely fragile. Every point along a thread of memory can be influenced by external forces and produce deviations in the outcome, like an editing bench that can be freely edited.

Such memory, though vivid, is not trustworthy, and pales next to true reality. Throughout its first half, Memory Administration Bureau continually uses setting, narrative, and audiovisual technique to emphasize to viewers the trustworthiness of memory—only to overturn that painstakingly built trustworthiness in the later plot. By simulating multiple media forms it shows the audience memory’s mechanisms, and repeatedly expresses through Guan Chao that his memories of those concrete experiences have long since blurred—that what the audience sees is not an unblemished reality.

04 Epilogue​

In just seven episodes, Memory Administration Bureau fully presents the creators’ understanding of memory as a mental activity, letting the audience experience the vividness of a memory and also sense its illusoriness.

Memory may be riddled with holes, may be fragile and easily destroyed, yet it is almost the only proof by which a person confirms their own existence, and the only vessel of sincere feeling between people. This theme, tinged with existentialist philosophy, is to me the most precious core of Memory Administration Bureau.

In the animation, Guan Chao would rather accept the death of his body than forget his memories, because memory records his real experiences, feelings, and existence. And those carefully crafted imitations of physical media in Memory Administration Bureau are likewise engraved in the audience’s memory of this anime.

Many works tell stories about memory, but few animations can, like Memory Administration Bureau, translate memory’s ambiguous and shifting inner workings from abstract psychological feeling into visual narrative. Perhaps its worldbuilding and plot arrangement are not yet refined enough, but those sharp, romantic, even reckless expressions are enough to make this summer unforgettable for Chinese animation fans.

Especially the final two episodes, which suddenly plunge into a cruel, realistic storyline, make the show’s existentialist landing all the more visceral. The creators did not let Guan Chao resolve his predicament in a conventional sense, delivering a happy ending that satisfies both character and audience. Nor did they try to offer a clear solution to the plight Guan Chao suffers. Instead, they acknowledge existence itself, wrapping the pain born of the predicament in memory’s powerful, genuine capacity for feeling. Perhaps the value of memory lies not in whether it is faithful to objective truth, but in that it once carried real feeling.

Even though memories naturally fade and distort, animation offers another possibility of “preservation.” Six years of creative labor have frozen those fleeting emotions within the frame.

Memory Administration Bureau offers its viewers, through its story, a reflection on memory itself. Even though reality cannot be relived, a memory that has been seen and empathized with gains a power that never fades. This six-year creative journey has, through animation, completed the act of treasuring memory itself.