This Boy Can Fight Aliens Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

This Boy Can Fight Aliens Blu-ray Movie Review

This anime can fight boredom.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 23, 2012

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 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

This Boy Can Fight Aliens Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• 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.


• Trailers for Other Sentai Filmworks Releases

This Boy Can Fight Aliens Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.