Alien 9

A decade before Madoka Magica subverted tropes of the magical girl genre and spawned a new wave of “darker” magical girl shows, Alien 9 did something a similar vein. Starting off as a quirky sci-fi slice-of-life featuring cute girls fighting aliens, this 4 episode OVA lulls you into thinking it’s a fun little sci-fi adventure romp with its unassuming first episode, and then proceeds to shatter those expectations throughout it’s the rest relatively short run-time. It’s a bizarrely off-kilter yet compelling mixture of quaintness and horror that puts a uniquely sadistic twist on common anime tropes, even by today’s standards. Unfortunately, we’re ultimately provided withonly a small taste of the OVA’s potential, as its short episode count prevents it from becoming something truly substantial. The OVA follows three elementary school students who have been selected to be their school’s alien hunting squad. There’s Kumi, a girl much more mature and responsible than most kids her age, and a big sister-like figure to her friends and classmates. Kasumi, an accomplished child-prodigy, who volunteered herself to be part of the school’s alien hunting squad. And then there’s Yuri, a timid cry-baby who was selected by her classmates to be part of the alien hunting squad because she didn’t participate in any other school clubs or activities, and the show’s main focal point. The girls aided by aliens called Borgs, which perch themselves on the girls’ heads like hats, and supervised by the cheerful Ms. Hisakawa, who seems too enthusiastic to push the girls to hunt aliens. Now, if this situation off to you, it’s because it is. It does pit little girls against aliens, after all. Though it may not appear so strange at first, partly because this kind of thing is commonplace in anime, but also because the show introduces the premise as nonchalant and matter-of-fact. Nobody ever questions the ethics of sending little girls to catch dangerous aliens, Ms. Hisakawa seems to be more pre-occupied with monitoring and taking the girls than the safety of the girls. Early on, the show itself treats some of the alien encounters with a certain lack of seriousness and urgency, often showing them in fun little montages, as if to intentionally downplay the severity of the situation. Even Yuri’s scaredy-cat tendencies are played for some laughs. The show takes advantage of the tropes of the medium to fool the audience into thinking it’s a fun little show, and not questioning the bizarre and unethical nature of what is demanded of the girls. Of course, it the show doesn’t stay this way for too long, as the danger the girls are in become very apparent and the show’s content becomes progressively more disturbing. After some events that would traumatize any elementary school student, the show stops treating Yuri’s crying fits as comical and more as the harsh and horrifying truth of the situation. Yuri, for all her crying, is right to be scared; serving as the anxious fear-ridden heart of the show. She’s a shy, timid girl forced against her own will to fight aliens and continuously pressured to do so despite her objections. She even starts having nightmares about her ordeals, which are colorful and even child-like depictions of her rational fears. The contrast between the cartoony visual direction and the darker thematic content of the show make the experience even more bizarre and unsettling. Even when the show is at its most surreal and violent, the art retains a certain cutesiness which makes it all the more sinister. Yuri isn’t the only one that suffers psychologically as the show progresses, however. Mature and confident Kumi, whom Yuri heavily relies on, and even the enthusiastic Kasumi have their own mental and emotional scars. Their familial issues and struggles with responsibility and loneliness are just as relatable as Yuri’s fear, if not even more so. Unfortunately, the OVA’s short episode count only allows a very light examination of their psyches. This inconclusiveness envelops the OVA as a whole; the plot largely goes unexplained and left with a lot of loose ends, including a cryptic final shot which is frustrating on multiple levels. Regrettably, this severely undercuts the show’s impact. For its ambitions, Alien 9 suffers from a curious lack of purpose. It succeeds in subverting commonly used tropes and weaving a grim tale from a cutesy aesthetic, but the hanging plot and rushed catharsis leaves a certain lack of fulfillment as the OVA ends. Sadly, this ultimately devalues what the show accomplishes to an extent, making it a half-fulfilled promise of what it could have been. The show was produced in the early 2000s, a time when anime was transitioning from hand-drawn cells to digital cells, and it’s pretty easy to tell just by looking at the show. The digital coloring and animation was not the most refined, certainly not as refined as the anime series of the mid-2000s onward. It’s colorful and animated well, but the show doesn’t really pop visually outside of a few creepy surreal moments. The character designs are very purposely made cutesy, with emphasis on the characters round and expressive faces. The alien designs look more weird than threatening; they look appropriately otherworldly, but also oddly unmemorable. The Borgs in particular are peculiar looking, being frog-like creatures with wings that double as hats. The music, like everything else in the show, is deceptively light and bouncy. Mostly composed of xylophone, bells, flutes, and electronic beats, it’s an energetic soundtrack that progressively gets stranger as the show delves into darker material. Alien 9 is a nifty little oddity that has unfortunately become obsolete as time has passed. Its deceptive façade of cute characters and wacky hijinks with more sinister intentions it hides makes the OVA quite a novelty. Unfortunately, it never actually develops or expands on its themes, characters, or plot. This really diminishes the show’s value to little more than an interesting idea. This lack of development compounded with the upsurge of darker magical girl series pretty much ensure that Alien 9 is doomed to be an obscure novelty from the early 2000s, and nothing more.

You know the way stories like to big-up what children can do? Those stupid adults, they can’t fight off these alien monsters. Give it to the children. We’ll set up a club, or pilot a giant robot, or gain magical powers, and then we’ll show those baddies what for. Occasionally though, along comes another show that subverts that formula (apparently the word ‘subversion’ is a dirty word in anime reviewing circles, but I can’t think of a better word and making self-important nerds angry on the internet is fun so I’m going to use it anyway) and demonstrates what would actually happen if you gavea child that amount of power and responsibility. Evangelion does that with mecha. Madoka does that with magical girls. Alien 9 does that with a little girl being chosen to fight aliens. The story is set in a world where aliens are invading, of which they’re not doing a particularly good job of because they keep sending down the equivalent of dogs and bulls instead of laser wielding elite warriors. Or maybe they have no intention of invading, since they have aliens who sit on humans heads to protect them from monsters and helpfully lick their backs for them. Alien 9 is based on a manga that wasn’t completed when the anime was made, so not an awful lot is explained about the setting. The important part is Otani, a 12 year old girl drafted in her school’s Alien Defence Team. She only got onto the team because nobody else really wanted to, which the club supervisor points out is surprising. I mean, you get off class when aliens invade. You get an awesome pair of rollerblades and a sweet hat. OK you have to fight off aliens in who are intent on ending your life and keep exploding with green blood everywhere, but that’s OK because your hat will keep you safe with its drill tentacle things. The set up is very much like an awesome kids show where the children join a club and beat the smelly aliens. In reality though, when faced with these scary, angry, vicious aliens, Otani is petrified. Not simply frightened, but complete deadening fear where she can’t be calm as long as she has this post. The show really does drive home how much terror she feels towards aliens, to the point that she can’t function properly as a human being. What the show probably does best is showing her interactions with other characters and how they treat her fear. Her teammates and friends think they can help her by being supportive, but that completely underestimates the extent of her fear. There’s that truly scrawpy moment where her feelings are channelled directly into the other two’s minds (I think it was through some kind of mindshare the aliens they wear on their heads enable? As I said, not much is explained about the world in this show) and the two of them collapse on the ground in utter terror. The subsequent looks on their faces when they see Otani again show how little they understood of her fear before then. The club supervisor’s treatment of Otani is a stark contrast to Otani’s feelings. She treats Otani as though she’ll obviously eventually get over it if you just treat her normally, poo-pooing her requests to leave the club. She keeps hold of this idea that eventually she’ll be a good enough fighter by the end of the year when they ‘need them’ (for what reason they need fighters I don’t know, probably have to read the manga for that). It leads to these scenes where you’ll have Otani in a petrified state lying in a heap on the floor as her friends scream her name, followed by the supervisor balancing her pen between her nose and her mouth, being lightly scolded by the school principal for allowing the aliens in captivity to be killed. Alien 9 does have some obvious issues, such as the one I’ve been alluding to frequently in this post. It’s only a 4 episode OVA and it’s part of a much longer manga, so very little is explained about the world. This also means there’s relatively little development of the characters, beyond them getting even more petrified as it goes on. To be honest though, this isn’t as much as an issue at I’m making it out to be. The story is primarily about how absolutely fucking petrified Otani is, and the show does a fine job of getting that across. The rest is just set dressing. No, my real problem with this anime is that…well, I didn’t enjoy watching it. It achieves exactly what it sets out to do in portraying this character having her life deadened by fear of a role she has been pushed into, but the experience of watching that play out isn’t enjoyable. Otani is such a wimp at everything in life that it’s difficult to feel any attachment to her. The story has no emotional highs or pay-off at the end. It’s just deadening fear the entire way through. There’s plenty of anime that are gruelling and harrowing to sit through that I absolutely love. Berserk, Infinite Ryvius, heck even the two I referenced at the start, Madoka and Evangelion. Those anime have things like narrative arcs, character progression, thrilling visuals, humour (no, really), emotional payoffs. The gruel and suffering bring about these feelings, while Alien 9 doesn’t. It doesn’t even try to because it’s so focused on the feeling of fear. Alien 9 achieves what it sets out to do. It’s definitely left an effect on me too, as proven by the fact that simply hearing the BGM when I went back to take screencaps made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. But the experience isn’t particularly enjoyable. It’s for a similar reason I don’t really have any intention in checking out the manga. As a short OVA series, it’s effective at getting that feeling across it’s supposed to be portraying, but I don’t know if I could handle any more without getting tired of it.

This is one of the worst anime I have ever seen, bar none. I first watched this when I was getting into anime to be honest, a time when a feeble young mind tends to be overjoyed when it sees any anime, a time before standards start to be formed. Well, this was the anime that spurred on any sort of quality control in my mind, this was the anime that made me say "some anime are utter and complete crap", way to hit the very bottom of my standards, Alien Nine. And way to reference Cowboy Bebop on your box to make it looklike it might be something actually good. I enjoyed Eiken ten times more than this. Yes, Eiken. Story: 1 A 6th grader gets picked for the one class job she doesn't want: the alien hunter. Why she wouldn't this job is beyond me, there are two other people who also do the jobs from other classes who will do all the work for her and they don't have to do homework as a perk. So the episodes mostly show them fighting some alien that is heavily implied to have been put there on purpose just so they could kill it while we see the main girl, Yuri Ootani (as they will repeat 10 times in a row before the opening credits so you damn well know) cry and whine the entire show about how unfair it is that she has to fight these aliens and someone else can't do it instead. It only gets worse when the story tries to pretend it's deep but we're still watching a main who is actually more of a whinebag then Shinji Ikari himself whine. Anything it tries to imply to be deep is incredibly obvious to begin with so we're just left watching incredibly annoying characters for 4 episodes. It's hard to care about a story that wants to be all mature and dark when it fails it so clearly. Not to mention that the story just....ends, no closure or anything, it basically tells you to read the manga if you gave a crap about this as is. Character: also a 1 Yuri Ootani is the main and dear god does she whine the entire time and I mean the entire time. She cries when playing a recorder, when taking a bath, when trying to fight aliens in which she stands back and cries the entire time while her teammates tell her to stop crying, it's like this entire show revolves around her crying. The other two teammates....not quite as bad. There's the normal girl and she's pretty much unremarkable. She neither adds much nor subtracts much to the show and she's obviously the best character if only because she doesn't flat out suck. Then there's the other girl who reminds me of Violet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, an overachieving little smart alec who is annoying because she spends most of the series making strange noises then she rather turns her brain off and starts acting weird. You'd think this might make her interesting as she's acting a bit odd, but it only serves to make her look incredibly pretentious. The borgs...not that bad I guess, they just never bother to explain them or any of their motives. Much like the normal girl, they're just kinda there as characters, although they're supposed to sync up with their partners and act as attack weapons of some sort, but they don't really do all that much as characters per se. Art: 6, Sound: 7 Sound is pretty good, I won't lie, the OP is a bit addicting. The art is...ok, I can say putting cutesy characters on "darker" material is new, Osamu Tezuka has been doing that for ages and now we've got better darker material drawn cutesy with Kaiba anyway. It's nothing terribly standout, it's just kinda there. Overall: 1 This is just torture to watch. You hear so many decent ideas above and every single one of them falls flat on its face thanks in no part to a terrible cast of annoying and boringly infuriating characters. And I've heard arguments this is deep, it really isn't, it tries to be pretentious at best in trying to force meanings that really aren't there and having only 4 episodes just made it a cocktease for a manga that I sure as hell don't want to read (and in fact haven't). At least I wouldn't have to hear Yuri cry every 3 minutes for the entire show in print format. Don't watch this, not ever, I'd sooner cut my own limb off then watch this again, but if anyone is in that stage where all anime is automatically good, watching something terrible like this to set your standards of good and bad back on track.

This was a very strange anime to me, which i what made me want to write a review. To be frank this anime to me was not that enjoyable but it does something that most anime don't. Alien Nine is full of symbolism providing an insight into the life of the average Japanese student. It starts off really lame. But after forcing myself to watch it to the end i still didn't get the story. it was not until i found out the anime was all about symbolism that i finally began to understand the true meaning of the anime. (for u to find out) Ifu do decide to take a swing at this anime i suggest u read the article from this site after: http://anime.mikomi.org/episode/914/Will.html warning it contains spoilers however it does explain all the symbolism and made me understand the story better. It changed the score from a 4 to a 6. keep in mind that im very strict with my anime.

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