We Are Aliens
Shifting seamlessly from realism to surrealism, this Japanese film combines different animation styles to tell the story of two boys, their friendship and its eventual rupture.
In the third-grade, Tsubasa becomes friends with Gyotaro. While Tsubasa feels invisible, Qyotaro’s quirkiness makes his classmates admire him. Despite their differences, their friendship blooms and fills their summer with adventure.
Slowly disagreement starts seeping into their play, and finally a chain of events caused by misunderstanding and deceit rips them apart. Their friendship ends, and guilt and confusion about what happened follows them into adulthood.
The breathtaking film combines 2D animation and rotoscoping, where the characters are animated over the actors. The animation floats from realism to dreaminess, and even to the horrifyingly surrealistic.
We Are Aliens is a decade-spanning coming-of-age story about how to go on with your life when the window of opportunity to ask for forgiveness has passed. Kadowaki’s debut feature is an intimate description of childhood conflict and the casual cruelty that human beings are capable of. The film beautifully captures what it’s like to feel like an outsider and people’s inability to let go of the past. The point of view moves between characters as well as timelines, which reveals and highlights the subjectivity of memory and brings to mind the masterful film Monster by Hirokazu Kore-eda (R&A 2023). The gruelling series of events is slowly revealed to the viewer.
Anni Rossi (translated by Johanna Järvinen)
Screenings
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Kinopalatsi 2Sat 19.9. at 20.30–22.27117 min, 1/3
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Kinopalatsi 2Fri 25.9. at 18.45–20.42117 min, 2/3
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Kinopalatsi 1Sun 27.9. at 13.30–15.27117 min, 3/3
Trailer
