Kenichiro Akimoto’s All You Need Is Kill returns to Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s 2004 source novel, previously filmed as Edge of Tomorrow, leaving a new set of bootprints. Where Tom Cruise’s live-action vehicle offered steely skies and militarised bombast, this animated reimagining opts for Skittle colours, circumspection and a gendered shift in perspective.
Sakurazaka’s novel, illustrated by Yoshitoshi Abe, and its earlier adaptations follow Keiji, a raw recruit trapped in a time loop on the day humanity is massacred by alien “Mimics”.
Akimoto instead centres Rita (voiced by Ai Mikami), previously a supporting figure, here recast as a disaffected worker assigned to monitor a vast, tree-like alien organism that has crash-landed on Earth. When the dormant structure erupts, spawning carnivorous flowers – more Triffid than Little Shop of Horrors – Rita and her crew are massacred. She dies and wakes up at the start of the same day. And repeat.
The reset becomes both narrative engine and existential trap.
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The machismo of the Hollywood iteration makes way for melancholy, desperation and puppy love. The most striking departure, however, is aesthetic. Akimoto and his team at the independent Studio 4°C animation studio – the crew behind the Berserk: Golden Age Arc – trade gunsteel realism for rainbow spores, prismatic roots and a grotesquely beautiful “world tree” that is simultaneously a botanical marvel and a gobbling, geocidal parasite.
Character designs by Izumi Murakami exaggerate flailing limbs and wide-eyed expressions, lending personality to headliners Rita and fellow looper Keiji (Natsuki Hanae). Imaginative montages chart repeated failures without repetition, culminating in the most psychedelic denouement since 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are technical blips. Occasionally, the 3D character animation and frame-rate stutter in the margins. But the film’s approximation of temporal confines never leaves the viewer feeling stuck in a moment.
All You Need is Kill is in cinemas from February 27th
