Miyu Backs Bittersweet Coming-of-Age Tale ‘We Are Aliens' From Music Video Maestro Kohei Kadowaki (EXCLUSIVE)
French animation powerhouse Miyu Productions has teamed with Tokyo-based upstart Nothing New to co-produce 'We Are Aliens,' a coming-of-age tale now in development, and slated for completion by March 2026.
The project marks the first animated feature from 28-year-old director Kohei Kadowaki, best known for his visually striking music videos for chart-topping acts like Yoasobi and for his experimental blend of live-action and animation.
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'We Are Aliens' tells the story of two boys, Tsubasa and Gyotaro. Tsubasa is quiet and serious, while Gyotaro is a cheerful genius. As kids, they were close friends, but jealousy and misunderstandings drove them apart. Years later, their lives have gone in different directions—but when memories from the past come back, both must face what happened between them.
'This film turns the spotlight on the half of adolescence anime rarely touches,' says director Kohei Kadowaki, promising a bittersweet film redolent in both pain and joy. 'Through children's quarrels and first loves—small events in a small place—the film poses universal questions: What does it mean to grow old? What is happiness? By affirming the Tsubasa and Gyotaro that dwell in every heart, it aims to become a story cherished across time and borders.'
'We are constantly seeking bold, singular voices in animation,' add Miyu producers Emmanuel-Alain Raynal and Pierre Baussaron. 'From the moment we saw the first images of 'We Are Aliens,' we were convinced of the strength of the project—and that we were witnessing the emergence of a major new voice in global animation.'
Miyu Productions previously collaborated with Tokyo-based Shin-Ei Animation on 'Ghost Cat Anzu,' which premiered out of Directors' Fortnight at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Miyu's new partnership with Nothing New was born of that same trip down the Croisette, where the two companies connected over a shared commitment to ambitious, director-driven animation.
'We met our like-minded partners during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and have since held detailed discussions,' says Nothing New producer Kentaro Hayashi. 'It is an honor to announce our collaboration at this juncture, and we will continue working together to deliver this film to the widest possible audience. [Director] Kohei combines breathtaking visuals with delicate storytelling. With his distinctive style—unlike anything in Japanese animation to date—we intend to set a new benchmark for coming-of-age cinema.'
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Prix Fitzgerald 2025 Laureate Announced at Hôtel Belles Rives
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This year's edition holds resonance, marking 100 years since the publication of The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's first stay in Juan-les-Pins in 1925, when he and Zelda moved into Villa Saint-Louis—now Hôtel Belles Rives. It was here, overlooking the same blue expanse of Cap d'Antibes, that Fitzgerald worked on Tender Is the Night, and where the mythos of the Riviera as a playground of writers, artists, and exiles began to crystallize. Ford's Be Mine, which revisits his beloved character Frank Bascombe, was praised for its reflection on aging, caregiving, and parenting in America itself, all told with Ford's signature blend of clarity, wit, and empathy. The jury commended the novel for capturing the existential tensions of modern life with a tone and depth that echoes Fitzgerald's legacy. 'My gratitude to the Prix Fitzgerald jury for their belief not just in my book but in books in general. 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It's a novel that doesn't try to shine—and that's precisely why it does,' said Marianne Estène-Chauvin, President of the Francis Scott Fitzgerald Academy and owner of Groupe Belles Rives. 'Like Fitzgerald,' she continued, 'Ford understands that the deepest truths live in silences, in hesitations, in sideways glances. He carries the elegance of disenchantment, the rejection of sentimentality—a style that never needs to raise its voice to move us. It is an honor—and, indeed, a distinctly Fitzgeraldian kind of jubilation—to welcome him among the Prix Fitzgerald laureates.' Ford joins an esteemed list of past American laureates including Joyce Carol Oates (2024), Quentin Tarantino (2023), Jonathan Dee (2022), Jeffrey Eugenides (2019), Jay McInerney (2016), and Christopher Bollen (2015). Special distinctions have also included the Gatsby Prize to Thadée Klossowski de Rola and the Zelda Prize to Dominique Bona. 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MEDIA CONTACTS:Nadeige Martelly, AMPR Globalnadeige@ +1 786 863 1363 Andria Mitsakos, AMPR Globalandria@ 954 294 4710Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
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The Dad Movie Century: This Father's Day, Choose from 10 Dad Movies across 10 Different Decades
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And of course, you don't have to be a dad or even a dude to enjoy any of these movies. If you walk in while someone else is watching them, and sort of stand off to the side in the middle of the room and wind up watching 30 or 40 minutes of it, you're the target audience. Dad Movies, as most people know, are not exclusively or even frequently movies that are actually about fatherhood. But they do tend to have father figures – mentors, male role models, and so forth – incorporated into the story. Angels with Dirty Faces is a crime drama that does this particularly well, as a hood named Rocky (James Cagney) bonds with a group of boys at the behest of his childhood pal, now a priest (Pat O'Brien) – despite Rocky's refusal to go completely straight. He's mostly concerned with strong-arming an old 'business' partner (Humphrey Bogart) into paying him some stashed money, but there's a clear contrast between Rocky's potential to guide young scrappers while setting himself off on a more self-destructive path. Cagney, Bogart, mouthy kids, crime, and basketball; this might be the most dad-coded movie of the whole 1930s. If the title sounds familiar to younger dads, maybe it's because it was spoofed via the fake gangster movie in Home Alone: Angels with Filthy Souls. Full disclosure: Dirty Faces might seem nearly as hard to find as the nonexistent Filthy Souls, because it's currently not streaming anywhere… but it is available on disc, and, you didn't hear it from us, but sometimes movies that aren't readily streamable are easy to find on the Internet Archive. Perhaps the most purely successful adaptation of any Ernest Hemingway work, this Robert Siodmak-directed noir brings Hemingway's short story of the same name to the screen, then expands beyond the events on the page with a flashback-heavy narrative following an insurance investigation of a slain boxer. The scrambled chronology and troubled boxer feel like an influence on Pulp Fiction, but whether the dad in question is a Tarantino acolyte or not, this is a tough, exciting yarn with great work from Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Director Howard Hawks had an affinity for showing men (and women) in working camaraderie, so no decade-spanning list of Dad Movies would be complete without one of his. It turns the siege story of a sheriff (John Wayne) who must hold off a land baron's flunkies in order to keep the baron's murderous son imprisoned until a U.S. Marshal arrives into a hangout western. It's both a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's and the inspiration for the John Carpenter film Assault on Precinct 13, only with more singing interludes. If part of the Dad Movie essence involves killing a lazy afternoon, this 140-minute western, which in both style and theme serves as a rejoinder to the taut McCarthyism allegory High Noon. There are plenty of valid points to debate over which picture is better; Rio Bravo, with its sprawl, comic relief, hangout vibes, and John Wayne factor, seems like inarguably more of a Dad Movie. Director John Sturges made a number of other classics of this era, like The Magnificent Seven, or, for the more thoughtful dads, Bad Day at Black Rock, while for some, the go-to Dad Movie of the 1960s is probably The Dirty Dozen, a different 150-minute World War II ensemble thriller, from director Robert Aldrich. 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Because he's played by Hackman, he's both charismatic and believably scary; the thrills are there, and vicarious, but Hackman and director William Friedkin give them a discomfiting edge. It's an up-to-the-minute thriller that kinda-sorta became a form of historical (but maybe not that historical) fiction as the decades passed. Kevin Costner is a major figure in Dad Cinema – which, as we know, does not necessarily mean playing famous dad roles so much as parts that dads like to see themselves in. It's telling, I think, that Costner's famous role in Field of Dreams as a farmer who receives a mystical message to build a baseball diamond is more son than father. His Ray has kids in the movie, but the emotional lynchpin is the ghostly ballplayers and, eventually, Ray's own departed, baseball-loving dad, who populate Ray's ballfield. In between Costner's more athletic turns in Bull Durham and For Love of the Game, he tests his acting chops even further by playing a regular guy who likes baseball but doesn't necessarily aspire to conquer the game, even for so much as the crack of a homerun or a perfect pitch. Costner has often been compared to classic movie stars like Gary Cooper, and this is probably the closest he's come to that kind of quiet perfection. (For a bonus sports picture depicting a complicated father-son relationship with a little less sentimentality, check out Spike Lee's He Got Game.) Was anything in the late '90s more enjoyable than catching any given part of The Fugitive on cable? (Well, maybe not if you came in at the slightly deflating final 15 minutes and realized you missed all the good stuff.) A dad-flipping-channels classic chase movie, it has just enough pop-culture bona fides (Harrison Ford starring in an adaptation of a classic TV series), conspiracy plotting, crusty comic relief (courtesy of Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones), and pulse-pounding tension to give a whole movie's worth of satisfaction even if experienced in eight-minute chunks with frequent commercial breaks. What makes it particular Dad perfection, I think, is the degree of methodical process Ford's Richard Kimball goes through in matters small (eluding the cops when he returns to Chicago) and larger (proving his innocence in the murder of his wife). There's a practical to it that feels so much less farfetched than any number of its fellow '90s movie-star vehicles. The historical epic is a go-to Dad Movie subgenre, but these lavish productions can become tedious pageantry so quickly and easily. Master and Commander takes place in the early 19th century – when oceans, as the famous intro card says, are battlefields! – and mounts some of the most impressive ship-to-ship battles ever seen on screen, led by Russell Crowe deep into his prestige-movie-star era. This feels like it should be watched from a real good armchair. James Mangold may be the most Dad-coded director currently working; his films include a Bob Dylan biopic, a Johnny Cash biopic, one of the only good non-Rocky Stallone movies, and a Russell Crowe/Christian Bale western. He even made a superhero movie about being a regretful but badass old guy. His crowning achievement in this field – not his best movie, but his Dadliest – may be Ford v Ferrari, a racing-car saga that's barely even about car racing, but designing and building the damn cars. It's also a confident delight, with two perfectly pitched movie-star performances and a dash of history. The obvious 2020s pick would be Top Gun: Maverick. But does anyone need to be told to watch Top Gun: Maverick three years after it set box office records? On the other hand, another slightly melancholic legacy-style sequel featuring a familiar, beloved hero in middle age only did typical Bond business when it was finally released in 2021. But No Time to Die is a perfect Dad Movie for anyone looking for slightly more emotional engagement than a typical Bond installment, while maintaining the country-hopping production value we all expect from this series. You get newfangled in-continuity Sad Bond who's in love with Léa Seydoux (and is a secret dad himself!), old-fashioned charming Bond flirting with Ana de Aramas in Cuba, and cool stuff with motorcycles and cars. Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at He's a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
Gizmodo
4 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Sony is Still Putting Its Faith in ‘Marathon'
Bungie's Marathon is still coming out, and when it does, PlayStation plans on giving the extraction shooter a fair shot. During a recent investor interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment head Herman Hulst assured the game would come out before March 31, 2026, when Sony's fiscal year ends. Touching on its recent alpha test, he descbied the feedback as 'varied, but super useful. […] The constant testing, the constant re-validation of assumptions that we just talked about, to me is just so valuable to iterate and to constantly improve the title, so when launch comes, we're going to give the title the optimal chance of success.' Hanging over PlayStation is 2024's sci-fi shooter Concord, which shut down weeks after launch and later led to developer Firewalk Studios closing down. That's been just one of several botched attempts from PlayStation's attempts to enter live-service games, which includes several canceled projects and layoffs across its first-party studios. While acknowledging these 'unique challenges' and attributing Concord's failure to the 'hypercompetitive market' of hero shooters, Hulst talked up how they're avoiding the same mistakes with Marathon. 'It's going to be the first new Bungie title in over a decade, and it's our goal to release a very bold, very innovative, and deeply engaging title. We're monitoring the closed alpha cycle the team has just gone through. We're taking all the lessons learned, we're using the capabilities we've built and analytics and user testing to understand how audiences are engaging with the title.' One thing Hulst didn't touch on, though, was the recent accusations of art plagiarism levvied against Bungie. In May, artist Fern 'Antireal' Hook released evidence alleging the studio stole assets she made from previous work and failed to credit her. After investigating, Bungie attributed the theft to the work of a former employee, publicly apologized, and said it would do 'everything we can to make this right' with Hook. It also promised to review all in-game assets and replace 'questionably sourced' art with original, in-house work. With the mention of its arriving before the fiscal year ends, Marathon may be delayed out of its current September 23 launch. At time of writing, Bungie and PlayStation have kept mum on a potential delay, but the game failed to make an appearance at PlayStation's recent State of Play in early June. [via IGN]
