We Are Aliens opens today with a Cannes laurel that contradicts its own brackets
The first anime feature of the autumn opens in Japan today carrying a laurel that reads OFFICIAL SELECTION - CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, with Directors' Fortnight in brackets underneath. Those two things cancel each other out.
Kohei Kadowaki's We Are Aliens opens nationwide in Japan today, 117 minutes long, from a first-time feature director who wrote, directed and cut it himself. It is one of the more interesting animated films of the year and it does not need the sales copy it has been given.
Its Australian distributor's page carries a laurel reading: "OFFICIAL SELECTION – 2026 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL (Directors' Fortnight)."
That is a sentence at war with its own parenthesis.
The Quinzaine is not part of Cannes' Official Selection, by design
The Quinzaine des Cineastes — Directors' Fortnight in English — is run by the Societe des Realisateurs de Films, an independent organisation of French directors. It was founded as a parallel event and it programmes its own slate. Cannes' Official Selection is a different list, chosen by different people, with its own competition and its own jury.
A film in the Quinzaine premieres during Cannes, in Cannes, to the Cannes press corps. That is real and it is worth something. It is not Official Selection, and putting both phrases on one laurel produces a credit that cannot be true as written.
The outlets that covered the premiere got it right — they reported a world premiere at Directors' Fortnight, without the Cannes-badge framing. The laurel is a distribution asset, and distribution assets travel further than reviews.
It competed at Annecy and won nothing
The same page carries a second laurel: Annecy 2026, in competition. Also true. What neither laurel says, because laurels never do, is that the film left Annecy empty-handed. The Cristal for Best Feature went to The Violinist, directed by Ervin Han and Raul Garcia.
"In competition at Annecy" is a genuine distinction for a debut feature. It is being used in a position where readers will assume it means a win.
The film underneath the laurels
- Two inseparable childhood friends in a quiet Japanese town — awkward third-grader Tsubasa and gregarious Gyotaro — are separated by a single event, and the film follows the consequences through adolescence into adulthood.
- Ryota Bando voices the adult Tsubasa, Amane Okayama the adult Gyotaro, with Ten Yamasaki, Kemuri Matsui, Gaku Sano, Arisa Sasaki and Edo Harumi in support.
- Music by Yaffle; theme song "Sasakure" performed by Adieu.
- Planned and produced by Nothing New, with production cooperation from Miyu Productions in France. Toho Next and Nothing New distribute in Japan.
- It runs 117 minutes and took roughly five years from concept to completion, about three and a half of those in production.
The technique is the story nobody is selling
Kadowaki built the film as a hybrid: rotoscope for body weight and facial nuance, traditional hand animation for hair and clothing. He has said the two approaches are linked rather than alternated.
The detail that makes this worth reading twice: most of the animation crew had little or no prior animation experience. Rotoscoping a feature with a team that has not animated one before is a staffing solution as much as an aesthetic choice, and the film is being praised for a look that came out of that constraint. Kadowaki has not framed it as necessity, and it would be unfair to claim he did — but the two facts sit next to each other and neither has been reported alongside the other.
One more credit that is wrong somewhere
At least one review names the producer as "Nowness." Every other source, including the Japanese production itself, says Nothing New. Two English words, one of them right.
What is still unknown
Whether the Quinzaine laurel gets corrected before the film's Australian dates — currently 7 October at the Japanese Film Festival and 19 October at Adelaide. What it cost. And whether a rotoscoped two-hour drama from a debut director finds an audience in a Japanese market whose autumn is otherwise wall-to-wall franchise sequels.
A film about the unreliability of memory has been sold with a credit that misremembers which festival selected it. Nobody planned that, which is the only thing that makes it funny.