We Are Aliens

The pains of childhood loneliness and the exhilaration of finding a first true friend, followed by fears born of wild imagination and an unnameable rage unique to a young soul, lie at the heart of We Are Aliens. This animated feature, the debut feature by Kohei Kadowaki, premiered at Cannes and is also being screened at Annecy. It is a delicate, bittersweet tale that brings together a wide range of subtle emotions – feelings that are vaguely present but never fully uttered, from joy and fear to regret. Here, the malaise of growing up is infused with a burgeoning sense of self and the uneven rhythms of coming of age among peers, as everyone stumbles through their own search for identity. Unflinchingly, We Are Aliens celebrates the untamed imagination of a child, while quietly mourning the fact that imagination can spiral so far beyond bounds that it becomes incomprehensible to others, and that whispered legends can spread so virally within a social circle that everything becomes distorted beyond recognition, yet impossible to correct.

The film follows two outcasts at school: Tsubasa, a taciturn boy who is not really interested in anything apart from video games, which he is not allowed to play, and Gyotaro, who always wears a yellow T-shirt and is loud, lively, and overactive, much like the colour itself. When they grow closer because of an origami ninja star floating down the river, their seemingly harmless childhood fantasies – of the kind that insist you must walk through a tunnel in a peculiar way, or that make you fear the moon is following your every step – become even more beautiful and endearing when shared by two. Their childhood is bathed in nostalgic green hues, and the animated images look both photorealistic and painterly at the same time. Animation places them in a space of childhood au-delà, an ailleurs, an elsewhere, while the line contours around them always seem ready to morph into the next micro-expression.

In an unexpected and remarkably clever manner, these fantasies gradually curdle into feelings of terror and disgust. At an age when every slight feels monumental and every emotion is magnified out of proportion, rage accumulates with nowhere to go. It is agonisingly uncomfortable to witness the mechanisms through which schoolyard myths are created and sustained, as well as the ways in which a popular child can suddenly be transformed into something else entirely in the eyes of their peers, or a sensitive child can become a bully in a desperate attempt to fit in. Reputations shift overnight, and public opinion hardens into stigma.

These childhood social dynamics are never loudly articulated, yet they are always present in the background. While one child grows up in a comfortable, modern bourgeois household with parents who are materially present and strict in discipline, yet emotionally absent, the other lives with his grandmother and younger sister in an old-fashioned, dilapidated house with hole-ridden shoji screens. The way their lives diverge at this crucial juncture, while they are searching for who they are and where they wish to belong, feels almost predetermined by their respective environments. To survive school life, the questions become starkly simple: to be bullied or to become a bully; to conform or to resist. And, as we have all asked ourselves at one point, the question is also how to seek acceptance while desperately trying to preserve a fragile sense of self.

We Are Aliens inevitably calls to mind Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (Kaibutsu). Both films probe the enigmas of the preteen psyche with rare empathy and from a child’s-eye level. Both explore the grave consequences of exaggerated rumours that initially appear harmless, and both regard adult behaviour with a profound sense of mistrust. Formally, they also share a fittingly limited viewpoint structure that shifts perspective from one boy to the other, since both films derive much of their power from our own prejudices as spectators, our preconceptions, and the forced revision of the reality we assume to be true; in both cases, the viewing experience has to be an active one, as we are almost made part of the public opinion formed inside the circle of the school. Yet, while Monster leaves its boys suspended in the eternal realm of childhood, We Are Aliens follows them into adulthood, which is so brutally grounded that its moments can even surpass those of childhood. As Gyotaro says when playing together as children, the needle that hurts most in this world is the one with a rounded head, because it takes much greater force to pierce the skin – almost an unexpectedly vivid metaphor for adulthood, where weapons are rarely sharp-edged, yet life is worn down by bluntness and attrition.

“We are aliens” might initially seem to allude to a sci-fi direction, as it does in the boys’ imagination, but what ultimately becomes more poignant is the quintessence of being aliens on one’s own planet. From childhood to adulthood, Tsubasa and Gyotaro remain extra-terrestrial in a society that demands conformity, and their eventual rift leads them down two widely divergent paths in their efforts to find a place of their own, through pretence, compromise, rebellious defiance, or, at times, abandonment. When they meet again, it almost feels as if the universe wants them to meet: Tsubasa chases a plastic bag that flies away in a storm, and Gyotaro, still in a yellow T-shirt and carrying his backpack and round-edged stick, holds that plastic bag beneath the bridge. Their spatial positions already mirror their places in the adult world: Tsubasa, in an impeccable suit, standing at the edge of a skywalk; Gyotaro, below, in the underpass. One has been crushed by life for trying to become an unnoticeable one among them, and the other has been crushed by life for refusing to become that. And it is only after all the buried feelings are finally laid bare that the two now-adults, whose divergent life trajectories unexpectedly converge once again, however briefly, arrive at the final exchange of shouted farewells, to each other, as well as to the versions of childhood they once possessed: “See you”.