This Boy Can Fight Aliens Blu-ray delivers stunning video and great audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
When aliens suddenly invade the world, Earth seems to be fighting a losing battle until Arikawa, one of the defense command staff, accidentally discovers a young man lying on a hill. Tests soon prove the impossible: this one teenager, Kakashi, has the power to defeat the attackers! Unfortunately, Kakashi has also lost his memory, and with it the knowledge of how to actually use his power. Moving Kakashi in with himself and his own commander, Shiro, Arikawa accidentally starts a strange triangle of emotions and relationships. A triangle that threatens the fate of the planet as Kakashi begins to question his own motivations!
Remember that scene in (well, those scenes—well, the whole damned movie) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Blu-ray
where little explanatory texts would float around the frame, helping to (supposedly) explicate what was going on, or at
the very least to identify various items? Now imagine that approach boiled down to an intense thirty or so minutes of
nonstop multimedia overload and you'll have a fair idea of what This Boy Can Fight Aliens! has in store. I'm not
sure if This Boy Can Fight Aliens! really makes much sense (and I've watched it twice now), but one thing's for
sure: this is a slam bang phort iece of visual ingenuity that will keep most eyes more than busy hopping from area to
area in the frame in order to make out everything that's going on. For the record, and because it's considerably more
rational than anything in the short itself, let's include Sentai Filmworks' own description about This Boy Can Fight
Aliens!:
Sentai Filmworks proudly continues the company's commitment to showcasing the newest and most innovating creators
and films in the anime field with their latest short film acquisition, This Boy Can Fight Aliens! Produced by CoMix
Wave, which helped initiate the current revolution in independent anime production with the works of Makoto Shinkai
(Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days) that have inspired a whole new wave of
animators in Japan, This Boy Can Fight Aliens! was written and created by director Soubi Yamamoto, who's
making her long format animation debut after producing animation for video games and cell phones.
When aliens suddenly invade the world, Earth seems to be fighting a losing battle until Arikawa, one of the defense
command staff, accidentally discovers a young man lying on a hill. Tests soon prove the impossible: this one teenager,
Kakashi, has the power to defeat the attackers! Unfortunately, Kakashi has also lost his memory, and with it the
knowledge of how to actually use his power. Moving Kakashi in with himself and his own commander, Shiro, Arikawa
accidentally starts a strange triangle of emotions and relationships. A triangle that threatens the fate of the planet as
Kakashi begins to question his own motivations! From up and coming director Soubi Yamamoto, and CoMix Wave, who
spearheaded Japan's new wave of independent anime production, comes a film that turns The War of The Worlds inside
out: This Boy Can Fight Aliens!
The précis from Sentai Filmworks is decidedly more detailed than anything in This Boy Can Fight Aliens!,
but
in the long run (or short run, as the case may be, considering the brevity of this piece) it really doesn't matter much,
because there's such visual ingenuity filling every square inch of the frame here that the "story", such as it is, almost
takes
a back seat. Yes, we're introduced to Kakashi, a young man who engages in daily battles with lone aliens who descend
from their orbiting spacecraft to take on the lone human seemingly able to keep them at bay. Kakashi is mentored both
by
Arikawa and Shiro, two operatives who also seem intent on helping Kakashi overcome some nascent insecurity caused
by
the fact that he's suffering from amnesia. But that's really all there is in terms of actual narrative arc here; this is a
short
made up of outlines, not details, at least with regard to whatever minimal plot there may be.
This short almost plays like a pitch reel, and it could in fact be expanded into a feature length outing quite easily,
something that would help smooth out some of the rough narrative edges and would give the Kakashi's back story a
little more emotional heft. As it stands, Kakashi's major angst turns out to be nothing to do with aliens, but the fact
that he's worried about turning on his cell phone, afraid that there will be no messages waiting for him. Again, this is
an intriguing enough character trait, but This Boy Can Fight Aliens! simply doesn't have the time to develop it
and so it's another small sketch in search of an in-betweener, to use an animation term.
As evidenced both by This Boy Can Fight Aliens! as well as the trio of shorts included on this Blu-ray as
supplements, Soubi Yamamoto is certainly an animation force to be reckoned with, one with a fully unique point of view
and style and one who certainly deserves a shot at some feature or series work. (I must confess to laughing at the
mention of Soubi's career path including "cell phone animation".) In fact, a good first feature would be an expanded
version of This Boy Can Fight Aliens!, for there are a lot of really intriguing elements at play here which simply
need a little more fleshing out. But for a "mere" sketch, this is one impressive little anime, one fairly bursting at the
seams with ideas and visual brilliance.
This Boy Can Fight Aliens! is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer
in 1.78:1. It's at least a little unusual to see an interlaced presentation of a short film like this, and while the screencaps
show some passing combing artifacts, the good news is, they're really not noticeable with the images in motion. This is a
really interesting looking anime, combining all sorts of different styles, from South Park-esque paper cutout
characters to swirling psychedelic computer rendered backgrounds. Add to that nonstop text floating here and there over
the frame and there is a lot to look at in This Boy Can Fight Aliens!. The presentation here is bold, colorful
with intentionally pushed contrast that makes colors bleed and whites bloom to outright effulgence. Line detail is crisp and
precise (despite the "jaggies" some of the screencaps may indicate) and overall this is a really nice looking high definition
presentation that is a lot of fun to watch.
This Boy Can Fight Aliens! sports two lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mixes, one in the original Japanese and
another English dub. Both of these tracks are similar, if not completely identical, in mix, though the English sounds like the
effects track has been slightly boosted in comparison to the Japanese. Voice work is well rendered in both tracks, and
though the mix here can be aurally as busy as the visual approach is, and despite these being "only" stereo tracks, there's
excellent clarity and precision here. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is also quite wide.
Soubi Yamamoto's Early Work includes three short animated features: Sekaikei Sekairon (1080i;
4:47), Ra/Radio Noise Planet (1080i; 3:33) and Robotica Robotics (1080i; 10:39). All three of these display
the same tendency toward having a kind of "multi-media" feeling, with text scrolling across the frame and multilayered
backgrounds which often feature tangential information being provided as dialogue or voiceover continues along.
A Brief Interview With Soubi Yamamoto isn't a live action piece, but rather a text based supplement that has
questions and answers printed to read.
This Boy Can Fight Aliens! is a fascinating short, but that's it's biggest drawback: it's simply nowhere near long
enough to fully develop its ideas. What remains, then, is a visually compelling piece that supports (and some might say
requires) repeated viewings, simply because there is so much information filling the frame at any given moment.
But "bells and whistles" like textual overlays can't replace an actual plot and character development, and in those areas
This Boy Can Fight Aliens! still needs work. This is a really excellent first step in what will hopefully be expanded
into a full fledged feature sooner rather than later. Soubi Yamamoto has an incredibly distinctive style that deserves further
recognition, and hopefully this Blu-ray can help to make that happen. This Sentai Filmworks release sports excellent video
and audio and comes with some great, if slim, supplements. Recommended.
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