martin

We Are Aliens

First and foremost, this movie is very much a promotional material. It was made as part of Nylon Japan's 20th anniversary celebrations and it is only a part of a much larger push to promote the magazine, make the alien characters popular, and make money off of them. Some of the other materials with them include variant cover pages in which they pose with the attractive young models who play in the movie, a series of NFTs, and probably some other stuff. Strangely, I think there aren't figurines, dolls, and other Moja merch I could find, so maybe the whole project wasn't all that popular. Like Visitors (Complete Edition), this full-length is an expansion of an earlier short. The structure is the same as Ugana's better, more famous and loved, monster movie - the original short is inserted as the opening of a series of tangentially connected vignettes. It also deals with largely the same themes as the monster movie, but the way it tackles them is pretty different. Take away the cute alien dolls, which move and behave in the most Minoru Kawasaki fashion, this movie is about alienation and societal expectations. Most of the human characters here are impossibly awkward people who seem not to fit into society because they feel incredibly burdened by the unnecessary demands of the contemporary world. One character, the gravure star Hina Kikuchi whom I'd just recently seen in Lilas Ikuta's newest song, craves some not-so-healthy looking food, but has to constantly stop herself, otherwise she'll feel like a loser. Another young woman feels like a loser, too, always clumsier than her colleagues, never as funny and cool as them. The ones who end up helping the distressed young people are the aliens. Originally, they came to invade, but through their insightful question-and-answer conversations with the human characters, they learn more about humanity and end up rooting for humankind. I think outside of being potential cute merch, the aliens are in here to show us the lack of connection in contemporary society. None of the characters can or seems to want to speak with other people. And even if they do, we can imagine, their would never open up. But all of them open up to the aliens, with their cute fluffy bodies and disarmingly honest and childlike direct questions. Trying to explain the world to the fluffy invaders, the humans start to see the randomness and lack of logic that drive the world. This liberates them. Probably reading too much into this cute cash grab, but who cares.