We Are Aliens (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for joy in the mundane
Take a Drink: for the moon
Take a Drink: whenever Gyotaro is a bit much
Take a Drink: for creepy faces
Take a Drink: for feelings and metaphors of guilt
Do a Shot: for toothbrushing
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Anime has enjoyed an ever-increasing presence at the Cannes Film Festival as of late, so much so it seems there’s at least one prominent selection every year. This time, it’s Kohei Kadowaki’s debut We Are Aliens, which is now featuring prominently at the world’s preeminent animation-only festival, Annecy.
We Are Aliens follows a couple of schoolboys, Gyotoro and Tsubasa, who are outsiders in their own ways. At first fast friends, time and social pressures erode their relationship over the years.
A Toast
From the jump, We Are Aliens is strikingly, gorgeously animated, blending impressionistic character design with at times literally photorealistic backgrounds. Kadowaki really immerses us in small town Japan circa the early 2000s or so, stunning us visually with the lifelike commingling of the natural world and the man-made one.
Kadowaki proves just as deft a hand at building character and story. He really knows how to ramp up the intensity and bizarreness of adolescent feelings and actions- human behavior is uncanny enough without conspiracy theories and the supernatural, but the way he blends them at first in a child’s imagination and then in the warped way rejection and shame manifests in adulthood is at times terrifying. He knows that feelings of love and hate for peers and friends can be equally intense, as can the teenage guilt and ennui that follow, and especially as an adulthood defined by grievance sets in.
At the midpoint, he rewinds to tell the same story from Gyotoro’s perspective, and surprisingly Tsubasa isn’t the second lead Gyotoro was in his- or at least insofar as Gyotoro thinks. This changing of perspective just underlines how small decisions, conversations not had, omissions of facts and seemingly innocuous pranks can reverberate through the years, shaping who we become in ways both subtle and obvious.
Beer Two
The character animation takes some getting used to- everything is hyperrealistic, even the people, except when they aren’t in an elevated anime via pencil drawing sort of way. It’s kind of hard to describe, but this produces some grotesque-looking reactions- on purpose, but sometimes legitimately difficult to look at.
Verdict
We Are Aliens makes the case that we are all in some ways aliens to each other, but interpersonal first contact is essential for everyone.
