Some stories need no Hollywood budget. Kohei Kadowaki’s animated short We Are Aliens, selected for the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, is proof that the most powerful films are often the quietest ones, the kind that sneak up on you, land a gut punch, and leave you staring into the middle distance thinking about that one friend you never rang back.
The film follows two childhood pals who drift apart after elementary school, only to cross paths again three decades on. Time has done its thing, hairlines have retreated, lines have deepened but the memories, stubbornly, have not. Kadowaki wanted to bottle that peculiar alchemy of reunions: the moment a familiar voice collapses 30 years into a single breath.
The title, he admits, was designed to disorient. “I wanted a title that would feel open to interpretation, one whose meaning would change between the moment it first appeared on screen and the moment the audience left the theatre,” he said. Job done.
What sets We Are Aliens apart from the festival-circuit wallpaper is its deliberate restraint. Kadowaki steered hard away from melodrama, choosing instead to build his narrative from granular, lived-in moments the kind audiences recognised as their own. His goal was to capture what he called the atmosphere, even the scent of childhood. Not nostalgia as a sales pitch, but nostalgia as a physical sensation.
Every frame carries that ambition. As animation director, art director, colour designer and editor all rolled into one rather tired human being Kadowaki obsessed over sensory texture, convinced that emotional realism could only follow sensory realism. The details, he argued, mattered as much as the dialogue. He wasn’t wrong.
His own road into animation was a detour. He’d dreamed of painting until a rewatch of a Doraemon film at some impressionable teenage age rerouted everything. Animation, he decided, was the medium through which he wanted to tell stories. Annecy, it turns out, was a good place to prove it, a festival he had admired since boyhood, and whose selection he described as a dream realised.
The production was no cakewalk. Long days bled into longer nights, the relentless grind of layouts, direction and reviews taking a physical toll. What kept the team upright, Kadowaki recalls with warmth, were the late-night meals, the light-hearted nonsense and the shared belief that the film was worth the punishment.
Audiences who walk away from We Are Aliens expecting a tidy resolution may find something more interesting instead: a quiet invitation to fall in love with the world on screen then realise, with a small start, that the place they had been longing for was their own.
As for what’s next, Kadowaki is leaning into instinct. Unconventional visuals, fluid designs, bolder experimentation, the kind of creative swagger that Annecy selections tend to produce. Memory fades. The feeling it leaves behind, he’d likely say, has no such plans.
