We Are Aliens Wins Sitges Anima't Award for Best Feature
Sitges places We Are Aliens first in a second festival's feature competition, after Ottawa's Grand Prize last month, and the win puts Kadowaki in the line of Japanese directors who have taken the same award.
Reporting from 1 source: Anime News Network.
Kohei Kadowaki and NOTHING NEW's We Are Aliens won the Anima't Award for best feature-length film at the 59th Sitges Film Festival in Catalonia. It is the first Japanese film to take the award since Yuta Murano's Seven Days War six years ago; Makoto Shinkai's your name. won in 2016 and Mamoru Hosoda's Mirai in 2018. Kadowaki, who turned 30 on October 14, is the youngest Japanese director to win it.
NOTHING NEW planned and produced the film, with French studio Miyu Productions joining the project in June 2025 as a production collaborator. Yaffle, whose credits include music production for Fujii Kaze and Kenshi Yonezu, composed the score, and adieu performs the theme song "Sasakure" (Split). Kadowaki holds five credits on the film: planner, scriptwriter, director, storyboard artist and editor. He also created the second BEASTARS season's ending sequence and music videos for YOASOBI. The film opened in Japan on September 15 and had already screened at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight on May 14, in competition at Annecy, and at the Melbourne, Busan and New Zealand festivals.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- Anime News Network News We Are Aliens Film Wins Sitges Film Festival's Anima't Award