“We Are Aliens is not exactly a feel-good movie; something is always lost and laced with melancholy.”

“What do you do when you miss your chance to say you’re sorry, and it gets too hard to say?”

Children can be cruel, and school bullying can lead to life-long trauma. In Kohei Kadowaki’s gorgeous but far from uplifting debut feature We Are Aliens, a small incident between two young boys leads to a decades-long rift and the ostracizing of one of them, something that will follow him around for the rest of his life. Told from two perspectives that mirror each other in the film’s midway title card, We Are Aliens shows that ‘sorry’ is indeed the hardest word, and that the path of least resistance is often the easiest to choose, especially when the peer pressure of a school environment is in the mix.

In the third year of elementary school the shy Tsubasa meets class favorite Gyotaro, and the two become fast friends. Gyotaro’s wild imagination draws the quiet Tsubasa out of his shell, but a small incident will have large consequences for both of their lives: during a bit of roughhousing on Gyotaro’s part, he inadvertently breaks Tsubasa’s umbrella. Not the worst of things, it may seem, but Tsubasa fears reprisals at home since it belonged to his strict mother. This minor issue leads him to distance himself from Gyotaro. Losing his only real friend pushes him into depression, and eventually suicidal thoughts, but an act of childish revenge will not just turn his life around, but that of Gyotaro as well.

Gyotaro is devastated when he sees his friend slowly ghosting him, but finds solace in a blossoming friendship with Konatsu, a crush that both boys are too clumsy to follow up on. When Konatsu becomes the victim of Tsubasa’s silly act of vengeance, Gyotaro gets the blame and the incident turns him into the pariah of the school. Suddenly Tsubasa’s star rises. Konatsu draws closer to him, and the cool clique accepts him as one of their own; his position as the black sheep of the class has been switched to Gyotaro. This causes the latter to fall into a dark hole of his own, and even if he finds a pal of sorts in another school misfit, Batahara, being shunned and picked on by his former friends, and in particular his best friend, affects him for the rest of his life.

Kadowaki’s decision to use the first two acts of the film to show Tsubasa’s and then Gyotaro’s point of view works wonders in the way the latter story fills in the blanks of the former. The choice to show the film’s title card only at the halfway point is not an act of posturing, but a conscious artistic decision that recontextualizes the story of a lost friendship that could have been saved. Certain moments are relived, and visual motifs like a game cartridge that symbolizes the bond between the boys, or each of them repeatedly seeing misshapen reflections of themselves, repeat in both stories, the latter a reference to the film’s title. It’s notable that the title is plural, as both Tsubasa and Gyotaro see only themselves or the other as ‘different’ or alien; the fact that they end up alienated from each other is the message of the film’s final act, which goes deeper into the rut of Gyotaro’s life after school. When the film jumps ten years ahead to a chance encounter between Tsubasa, now well-to-do and with a healthy social life, and the homeless and mentally unstable Gyotaro, Tsubasa’s final rejection of the man who used to be his best friend hits hard. The coda may show that the connection is not fully broken, even if they might never see each other again, but this bittersweet ending tastes more bitter than sweet. Like so many Japanese anime, We Are Aliens is not exactly a feel-good movie; something is always lost and laced with melancholy.

Kadowaki’s rotoscope animation gels well with the way he tells the story, through the fragmented memories of the boys. The background animation in particular is often stunning, and it is hard to imagine that the filmmaker only turns 30 this year. In the lyrical moments the style becomes more impressionistic, but for most of its runtime Kadowaki employs somewhat traditional anime, yet through the use of color and framing turns it into a very artistic version. Color and the contrast between light and darkness further sink us into the states of mind of Tsubasa and Gyotaro, going from an uplifting start to the more sombre and grim reality of Gyotaro’s life on the streets. Through his animation Kadowaki has crafted a beautiful but sad story about the detrimental effects bullying can have on a child; its accessibility, despite the artful approach, could make the film a useful tool for parents to help their little ones understand that.