The new All You Need Is Kill—director Kenichiro Akimoto and Studio 4°C’s animated reimagining of the time-loop novel that inspired Doug Liman’s Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow—asks: what makes this day different from all others? Its response, as a work with two decades of alternate versions in other mediums hanging over it, is to stake out an identity for dazzling visual style and extra video-gamey structure, with conventional drama taking on the mechanical quality of something already experienced a thousand times.
The premise, moderately altered from previous AYNIKs, is pared down to sparse form: in the not-too-distant future, a giant alien organism dubbed “Darol”—somewhere between a titanic flower, Yggdrasil-like world tree and towering sea cucumber—makes destructive interdimensional landfall in southern Japan, spreading hard, crimson light beams through the sky and house-sized ivory roots through the earth. Rita (voiced by Ai Mikami in Japanese, Stephanie Sheh in English) is a member of a mech-suited international volunteer relief and research force dispatched to ground zero, but not exactly a team player: irritable, anxious, and socially avoidant, she’s barely on speaking terms with her cleanup-crew colleagues when, one day, Darol erupts, birthing broods of giant insectoid creatures that quickly overwhelm and slaughter the humans—Rita included. This, of course, loops her back to the start of the day, kicking off a cycle of repeated days and deaths that turn her into a futuristic Cassandra cursed with the knowledge of mankind’s impending doom yet unable to convince anyone else to act, forcing her to think creatively in trying (and failing) every possible course of action for herself. Several-dozen deaths into the cycle, she meets Keiji (Natsuki Hanae in Japanese, Jadon Muniz in English), a meek technician and gamer also trapped in the loop who quickly becomes a vital ally.
Visually, this is all a treat of a sort that won’t be hugely surprising to fans of classic Studio 4°C productions like Mind Game and Tekkonkinkreet. Taking the farthest possible approach from the frigid grey-and-brown industrial realism of Liman’s film, Akimoto indulges brilliant light, deep and high-saturation colors, and stretchy, acrobatic movement. Darol’s alien innards are rendered in eye-popping prismatic motifs, dyeing the corrupted landscapes around it in the liquid patterns and colors of an oil slick while its crimson-laser apocalypse evokes Evangelion and neon-glowing, petaled-spawn hordes resemble the colorful enemies of games like Xenoblade. Electromagnetic powers give the animators license to play with image-warping digital-distortion effects, while 3D modeling is used unobtrusively to imply spatial depth or substantive heft behind the flat colors and characters—a restrained approach long overdue in an era where anime, including some of Akimoto’s previous work at Studio 4°C, has become overly tolerant of crude CG objects clashing with hand-drawn assets. The character designs are a marked contrast from popular anime standards, with distorted, asymmetric figures, narrow eyes, and sketchy linework that reject the idealized, cute and/or sexy pop stylings of the hits. Most notable is the frumpy, pragmatic heroine, whose commitment to her job of hard physical labor clearly outweighs her interest in aestheticizing herself, and whom the film (and Keiji) respects no less for it.
Textually, however, the film is a bit too adherent to video game inspirations for its own good. In the narrow early going, a rigid narrative functionalism and temporal weightlessness serve it well. A lack of developed supporting characters helps sketch Rita’s isolation even before she comes to occupy a literally different, even more repetitive reality than the rest of the human race. Action proceeds in supercuts of her repeated deaths to the bugs as she feels out the possibilities and “rules” of her predicament via failure, illustrating how her mind “levels up” across the loops—inferring goals, memorizing sequences, acquiring new skills, experimenting with equipment—despite her material circumstances continually resetting. Like a good game, the action’s aesthetics and mechanics are the primary draw, and the narrative is fundamentally player-driven. With Keiji’s introduction, though, the limitations of this approach as directed toward human drama start to show: retaining its narrow action-mechanical focus, the film struggles to paint a convincing interpersonal relationship as much as demonstrate the value of a co-op partner.
Rita and Keiji provide each other with battlefield saves and nifty upgrades (Rita gets overclocked mech-suit software, Keiji learns bug-squashing melee combat) but their conversations are largely relegated to exchanging plot information, and their psychologies—detailed in brief, semi-abstract flashbacks or hamfisted monologues—amount to bland dime-store analysis about the childhood traumas that created their adult social dysfunctions. Character development takes the form of people declaring they’ve developed since scenes the audience saw a few minutes ago. When the final act commits to slowing down the film’s resets and supercuts, it disintegrates into gorgeous but sense-numbing zero-G light shows, empty emotional big swings, and noisy pseudoscience babble to contrive the story toward its thematic endpoint.
Akimoto and screenwriter Yuichiro Kido clearly have earnest intentions to point the loneliness, ennui, and fatalism of AYNIK’s time-loop scenario at zeitgeisty concerns about socially isolated youth and impending climate disaster, but their 85-minute film’s relentless pacing and blunt expository bent don’t allow them much depth. The patience and subtlety necessary to convey the weighty existential despair of a cyclical existence, the world-expanding upheaval of discovering a kindred spirit, and transcendent uplift at the cycle’s overcoming just don’t translate in the script’s hasty, schematic execution, in which no moment in time can be dwelt upon for its texture and no action can occur that doesn’t serve the immediate logical demands of the plot. When, just before the final battle, Rita suddenly stops to admire the weather of the day she’s been living on repeat all this time, it’s a little hard to buy the gesture when the film seems as impatient as she’s been. It leads the ostensibly world-ending stakes to feel as weightless as life and death with a reset button. At least the graphics are truly next-gen.
All You Need Is Kill is now in theaters.