We Are Aliens

Annecy Film Festival: WE ARE ALIENS 👽 (2026)

As you get older, friendships shift… it’s less about the memories you’ve made, more about how long you’ve lasted together, and eventually into something softer and heavier: nostalgia you keep returning to, even when the present has changed shape.

In WE ARE ALIENS, we watch a friendship in its earliest form—two childhood friends moving from a world where everything feels like open ground to play on, into adolescence, where the rules quietly change. What once was effortless becomes self-conscious. What was once fun becomes something to measure. And fitting in starts to matter more than standing out.

The film traces a heartbreaking arc of outgrowing someone you once felt inseparable from, following a decade-spanning journey of two boys becoming men, and quietly revealing how time doesn’t always heal what it shapes.

Japanese director Kohei Kadowaki’s debut is remarkable, not only for its poignant study of adolescent friendship under pressure, but for its animation itself, which carries a tactile, almost breathing quality. Every frame feels saturated with emotion, like the visuals themselves are remembering something you almost forgot. It doesn’t just show you emotion, it makes you feel it. Joy, discomfort, affection, resentment—they don’t sit on the screen, they spill out of it.

Recent works by Tatsuki Fujimoto (Look Back, 2024) and Uoto (100 Meters, 2018) evoke similarly layered portrayals of friendship, revealing its capacity for both profound intimacy and quiet conflict.

At its core, WE ARE ALIENS understands that every friendship contains multiple truths, each shaped by a different perspective.

On one side we have a rambunctious, high-energy kid who refuses to shrink himself for approval, even as the world around him starts to see that same energy differently. What once read as life of the classroom begins to read as “too much.” The class clown slowly becomes the outsider. On the other side, there's someone who has spent years learning how to blend in, only to find themselves drifting away from the person they used to stick so closely to, now experiencing a quiet, uncomfortable distance that feels like secondhand embarrassment, or maybe just change.

The film doesn't ask you to pick sides. That's not the point. It understands that friendship doesn't fracture because someone is wrong, it fractures because people grow in different directions. And sometimes bromance doesn't translate into compatibility anymore.

There's a painful, familiar space in that: the attempt to recreate what once felt effortless. Trying to recreate old chemistry like it's something you can summon on command. But memory is not repetition, it's distortion. And what once telt electric can teel forced when the version of you that created it no longer exists in the same way.

This film isn't about aliens in the traditional sense. It's about alienation, filtered through a childlike imagination that transforms the unfamiliar into the extraterrestrial.

Life doesn't always announce the distance it creates; it just slowly stops aligning. That's what this film captures so painfully and so beautifully: that closeness is not permanent, even when it once felt guaranteed.

This story made me think about how easy it is, when you're younger, to dismiss people for being "too weird," when in reality they were often just unfiltered-still carrying a kind of childlike innocence you don't realize is rare until it's gone. WE ARE ALIENS is built like that contradiction: two halves of the same story pulling away from each other, yet still belonging to the same memory. And its ending lands with quiet precision, the kind that doesn't resolve the feeling, but sits with it.

It's animation as art, but also as emotional archaeology. Tender, painful, and honest about growth in a way that refuses easy comfort.

It leaves you with a simple truth: memories matter, but they can't hold a future together on their own. At some point, you have to move forward, even when nostalgia feels like the more comforting place to be.

WE ARE ALIENS is undeniably one of the best films of the year. 

Enjoy!

8/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 1hr34mins

Where: World Premiere at Cannes Film Festival & In Competition at the Annecy Film Festival

The Richmond Reviewer We Are Aliens Review - June 24th, 2026.