I’ve never seen a movie that looks quite like We Are Aliens. I can compare aspects of the style to other anime to give you an idea, but those different stylistic traits have never come together before the way they do here. Imagine if the Flowers of Evil anime had the time/budget to draw each of its rotoscoped frames with the level of detail of Shūzō Oshimi‘s most intense cross-hatched manga panels, and you’re in the vicinity of what We Are Aliens looks like. I don’t know if any anime has ever had so much intense line-work and shading throughout — the closest that comes to mind might be Children of the Sea or the one good episode of Uzumaki, but those were still applying such detail to stylized “anime” designs in contrast with the decidedly more realistic art in We Are Aliens.
The animation in Kōhei Kadowaki‘s first film is both amazing and uncanny, the most beautiful presentation of drawings that are often deliberately ugly. Seeing so many wrinkles and shadows suggested on the face of hand-drawn characters forces you to look at such minute details more than you would in a live-action film; in moments of heightened distortion, the effect can get nearly as grotesque as those painted Ren and Stimpy close-ups, except in fluid motion. Why was this film made using rotoscope instead of either just live-action or just animation? The immediate answer here is that the hybrid form creates the impression of a memory. And why does it use this hyper-realistic style? The answer becomes clear around 20 minutes in: this is not just a memory, but a nightmare.
Two different nightmares, actually. The first half of the film is shown from Tsubasa’s perspective before rewinding back in time to present the same events from Gyotaro’s point of view. In 3rd grade, Gyutaro seems cool to Tsubasa: he’s smart, athletic, makes up fun games, and he’s great at drawing dinosaurs. What more could you want in a friend? By 4th grade, however, Gyotaro’s eccentricities are less socially acceptable. Kids are spreading rumors that he’s “not human,” and even Tsubasa’s mom has heard that Gyotaro’s a “problem.” After overhearing Gyotaro joke about completing a “mission on Earth,” Tsubasa becomes convinced the worst is true about his old friend. Memories of Gyotaro sharing trivia about meteors or liking the Pokémon Deoxys now get twisted in his mind as evidence of a greater conspiracy.
While Tsubasa makes himself afraid of Gyotaro, Gyotaro’s story is a different sort of nightmare. He’s not an alien, just a creative, socially awkward boy subject to scapegoating and bullying. Even the things that seemed genuinely creepiest about Gyotaro from Tsubasa’s perspective — his disturbing concept for “the world’s most painful needle,” for instance — come from somewhere understandable once we see the other side of it. While Tsubasa thinks about Gyotaro occasionally over the next 20 years, Gyotaro becomes even more preoccupied with the friendship he lost as his whole life falls apart into misery.
How much you buy into that extreme preoccupation will affect your feelings about the third act, where Tsubasa and Gyotaro confront each other as adults and the undercurrent of bubbling anxiety goes into overload. For me, the nightmare register of Kadowaki’s direction is the one thing that makes this climax work. The story goes so far into melodrama it stopped feeling real to me at a certain point, but I still felt the intensity of fear despite its unreality, and continued to be wowed by how the animators kept upping the ante of illustrating such fear. A more grounded coda helps wrap things up, letting the emotion of the story more effectively sink in after the more heightened climax threatened to take things too over-the-top.
With a subtler, more convincing third act matching the strength of its first two, We Are Aliens could have been one of the best anime movies in recent memory. Even with a flawed finale preventing it from reaching such heights, it’s still an interesting story and an amazing accomplishment in animation, especially for a filmmaking debut.
