Paris-based sales company Charades has closed a raft of Asian deals on Kohei Kadowaki’s animated feature ‘We Are Aliens’ ahead of its Annecy International Animation Film Festival premiere in Competition.
The Japanese-French co-production has sold to Geen Narae Media in South Korea, Hooray Films in Taiwan, Shaw Organisation in Singapore, Intercontinental Film Distributors in Hong Kong and Sahamongkol Film in Thailand.

Written and directed by Kadowaki, “We Are Aliens” follows two boys in a small Japanese town whose friendship is altered by an act of betrayal that continues to shape their lives into adulthood. The feature marks the directorial animation debut of Kadowaki, a graduate of Tokyo University of the Arts whose distinctive visual style combines animation techniques with a keen observational approach to everyday life.

As a start, let’s go to the very beginnings: What is your very first memory of animation?

Kohei Kadowaki: My earliest memory of watching animation goes back to when I stayed at my grandmother’s house. There were only three films available to watch: “The Little Mermaid,” “Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan,” and “Doraemon: Nobita’s Great Adventure in the South Seas.” With no other choices, I kept watching those same three films on repeat. Those experiences became my first encounter with animation. It was the “Doraemon” films that first inspired me to pursue a career as an animation director. So, in a way, if I had never discovered those films, “We Are Aliens” would never have been made.

In “We Are Aliens”, the ripples a degrading friendship sends through time for both characters make for a heartbreaking tale, especially for one your two characters. How did you approach writing this story?

The memories of my first love and of a friend I gradually lost touch with have stayed with me very strongly over the years, and I believe they have had a significant influence on my creative work. The memories associated with them remain so vivid that I can still recall the scenes and atmosphere of those moments in great detail. In that sense, they became the starting point for this film.

Diving into your artistic process, you built a workflow blending 2D animation and rotoscoping. What led you to this approach, and how did these artistic choices resonate with your story?

Designing an experience that would allow audiences to genuinely empathize with the characters after watching the film was absolutely essential to the project.

Most of the animators who joined this production had little or no prior experience in animation. Because of that, I felt it would not be the most effective approach to ask them to create from scratch the countless small, seemingly unnecessary movements that make children feel real. To capture those subtle gestures, I decided rotoscoping was the most suitable technique, as it excels at preserving the nuances of human movement.

At the same time, I had used rotoscoping many times before and was well aware of its limitations. While it can achieve remarkable realism, it also risks sacrificing other important qualities of animation. If used carelessly, the result can end up containing less information than live action while also feeling less fluid and appealing than conventional animation.

To address this, we developed a hybrid approach specifically for this film. We used rotoscoping only to capture the essential elements of children’s subtle movements, delicate facial expressions, and complex shifts in body weight.

For elements that benefit from a more expressive and satisfying sense of motion—such as hair, clothing, and secondary actions—we relied on traditional animation methods beginning with rough drawings. By combining these approaches, we were able to overcome many of the technical limitations of rotoscoping.

I believe this visual language was something that needed to be invented specifically for this film. Through these choices, I hope audiences are able to intuitively recognize traces of their younger selves, or perhaps memories of a childhood friend, in the movements of the characters. The goal was to make the characters feel personally familiar even before the audience consciously reflects on the story.

Looking back, what changed between your first idea and the final film? 

The film’s fundamental structure has remained the same from the beginning. What changed along the way was the gradual incorporation of genre elements. Through countless storyboard revisions, I became increasingly aware of the need to sustain the audience’s attention and emotional engagement. As a result, moments of action, suspense, and cinematic spectacle found their way into the film. For instance, the action sequence between the two protagonists was not part of the original concept at all. It was added later as I searched for ways to enrich the viewing experience while staying true to the film’s emotional core.

The film is a French-Japanese co-production, could you elaborate on how you built this project together?

Everything started when our two producers brought a one-minute teaser to Cannes. Thinking about how one connection led to another and eventually brought us to this point, I find the whole story quite extraordinary.

In fact, the journey of this film has been so full of unexpected twists, encounters, and good fortune that it feels dramatic enough to be a movie on its own.

From Cannes to Annecy, the ongoing debate around AI is still vivid. As an animation director and multidisciplinary artist, how do you feel about this technology regarding to the animation industry?

Technology has long been able to automatically detect selection areas and fill colors with a single click. Yet fifty years ago, animators painted every single frame by hand using physical materials. From their perspective, they would probably think that we have it incredibly easy today.

In that sense, I see AI as just another tool in the ongoing evolution of technology. Every generation of artists encounters new tools that change the production process.

Ultimately, I don’t think the question is whether a tool makes things easier or more difficult. What matters is who can create the most compelling work. If a particular tool helps an artist achieve that, then it has value.

For me, however, I still believe that the most interesting ideas emerge when I think through them myself and translate them into drawings with my own hands. At the moment, that process remains the most rewarding and effective way for me to create the kind of work I want to make.

Because of that, I don’t currently see a significant role for AI in my creative practice.

‘We Are Aliens’ premiered in Cannes and is now heading to Annecy. How do you feel about this recognition from both festivals? 

I’m very excited. Before Cannes, I sometimes worried about how audiences would respond to the film and wondered what would happen if the reaction was lukewarm. But after the experiences we’ve had so far, those concerns have largely disappeared.

Now, my excitement is much greater than any anxiety. More than anything, I hope the audience enjoys the film, and I look forward to sharing it with everyone.

Today, as you yourself head to the festival, what is your take on the animated medium as an artist? 

I sometimes find myself thinking about what the definition of animation actually is.

Even in live-action filmmaking, many elements of what we see are artificially created. The lighting used on a set – whether to simulate sunlight or shape the atmosphere of an interior – is carefully designed rather than simply recorded. Makeup, painted surfaces, and countless other interventions are used to transform reality. Likewise, many creatures and environments created through CGI are, in essence, animation.

So when people ask where the boundary lies between animation and other forms of cinema, I find it difficult to draw a clear line. Personally, I tend to think of animation in a much broader sense. Rather than seeing it as a separate category, I see it as one of the many ways filmmakers shape reality and create movement, emotion, and meaning on screen.

Perhaps because of that, I regard animation as something much more expansive and natural than the conventional definition often suggests.