We Are Aliens won the Anima’t Award for best feature-length film at Sitges, the 59th Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantastic de Catalunya, which wrapped this week in Spain. The film is directed by Kohei Kadowaki and produced by NOTHING NEW, with French studio Miyu Productions co-producing.
It is the first Japanese film to take the award since Yuta Murano’s Seven Days War six years ago. The other Japanese titles on that list are Makoto Shinkai’s your name. in 2016 and Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai in 2018.
Kadowaki turned 30 on October 14. That makes him the youngest Japanese director to win the award.
What the film is
We Are Aliens, released in Japan as Ware Ware wa Uchujin, follows Tsubasa and Gyotaro. They became close friends in elementary school, then jealousy and misunderstandings pulled them apart. The film picks up years later, with the two grown and living in different directions, when the memories come back and they have to deal with what happened between them.
Ryota Bando voices the adult Tsubasa and Amane Okayama voices the adult Gyotaro. Yuto Maki and Tasuku Nakagome, both cast through auditions, play the two as children. The rest of the cast includes Sakurazaka46 member Ten Yamasaki as Konatsu, comedian Kemuri Matsui as Batahara, Gaku Sano as Tsubasa’s friend Seiya Toda, Reika Ozeki as the young Seiya, Arisa Sasaki as Toda’s friend Elmo Matsushita, and Edo Harumi as a calligraphy teacher.
Kadowaki handled planning, script, direction, storyboards and editing himself. He previously created the ending sequence for the second season of BEASTARS and has directed music videos for YOASOBI. Yaffle, whose credits include production work for Fujii Kaze and Kenshi Yonezu, composed the score. Artist adieu performs the theme song “Sasakure” (Split).
Miyu Productions, the French studio behind Ghost Cat Anzu and A New Dawn, joined the project in June 2025. NOTHING NEW planned and produced the film.
A festival run that keeps going
Sitges is the latest stop on a long tour. We Are Aliens opened in Japan on September 15. Before that it screened at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes on May 14 and in competition at Annecy, which ran from June 21 to 27.
It also played the Melbourne International Film Festival, the New Zealand International Film Festival and the 31st Busan International Film Festival, in a category titled “Japanese Animation Special: Masterpieces of Madness, Exhilarating Prospects 12+1.” Ottawa International Animation Festival gave it the Grand Prize for Animated Feature last month.
Western festivals have been giving anime features more room lately, and the results have been showing up in places like New York, where CloverWorks’ Grotesqqque had its U.S. premiere at the Japan Society this month. Two festival prizes for the same film within a few weeks is worth noting, because animated features rarely run this kind of circuit and then land a general release. This one did the release first and kept collecting awards afterward.
Why the Sitges result matters
Sitges is a genre festival, not an animation festival. Its Anima’t section exists to pull animated work into a program built around fantasy and horror, and the jury there is not automatically generous to anime. Winning it puts We Are Aliens in front of distributors and programmers who book theatrical genre titles rather than streaming catalogues.
That is the practical value of a prize like this. A film about two boys working through an old friendship is not an easy sell at a market table. A film with a Sitges award, an Ottawa grand prize and a Cannes sidebar on its poster is easier. The festival record is doing the work that a marketing budget would normally do.
For Kadowaki, the timing is close to ideal. He is 30, this is his first feature as director, and he has now won in Spain and Canada in the space of a month. Whatever he makes next will get attention it would not have gotten otherwise.
We Are Aliens does not have an announced release outside Japan yet. Sitges tends to be where those deals start.
Source: Comic Natalie, via Anime News Network.
Featured image: We Are Aliens key visual, via Anime News Network.
