It’s appropriate that Hiroshi Sakurazaka‘s light novel All You Need Is Kill, a story about trying something again and changing just a little bit each time, is getting a repeat adaptation. But it would be a disservice to the new film by Kenichiro Akimoto to call it the inverse of the Tom Cruise-starring Edge of Tomorrow (or is it Live. Die. Repeat?). This take, from a screenplay by Yuichiro Kido, is from the perspective of Rita instead of Keiji (or Cage, in the other film) – but they’re very different characters here.

Though there is overlap with the live-action adaptation (understandable, given the shared source material)—Rita’s perspective here is the difference-maker, as her story becomes more about her self-imposed isolation and inability to connect with people, a lingering symptom of an undisclosed childhood trauma. “I’ve been submerged ever since then,” Rita reflects at the film’s opening as she drives out into the desert, fleeing from something we can’t see. Red roots suddenly sprout from a portal and encircle the earth—Rita only smiles in response.

We learn the reasons behind this response as the film goes on, but the short of it is that she’s trapped even before the time loop begins; if anything that cycle gives her the opportunity to change herself—she has to change in order to survive, and fight til the next day. The writing is heavy handed in the delivery of this messaging, as is some of the imagery—showing her literally submerged in water in representation of the weight of her isolation. Her emotional journey
throughout the film is the anchor for All You Need Is Kill, even as it makes some head-scratching choices in the last moments.

For now, though, she’s a worker charged with disassembling the massive alien plant creature Darol branch by branch (not entirely far off the premises of Pacific Rim or Kaiju No. 8). Despite the funky mech suit, it’s not a military operation however, and so she goes through the same arc of floundering panic to assured combat prowess as Tom Cruise‘s character.

That training through repetition earned comparisons with video game structure for Edge of Tomorrow, but All You Need Is Kill doubles down—going as far as having a secondary character looking at a “Continue?” screen upon each death, or saying “it’s like a video game!” Such didacticism is something that happens frequently across anime, but it feels especially insulting here, when it’s so easy to infer: the characters have continual power-ups to their suit and weapons, for one.

Still, like it’s live action sibling, All You Need Is Kill is at its most pleasurable when it uses this checkpoint conceit as a prompt to play with editing, like cutting between Rita’s steps occurring in different resets, speeding up with each cut as she becomes more confident. Another distinction from the live-action film is that it adds another rule regarding the deaths and resets, which won’t be detailed here.

The little things add up to a film which feels worth seeing in spite of the similarities which are there. It’s also set apart by a hallucinatory style—not just in the different ways in which Akimoto presents the interaction between the alien threat and Rita’s mind, but also how the earth has mutated in response to their arrival. The colors are like looking at oil in water, while the 3D animation is dressed up with cel-shading and flattened, shadowless textures as well as scratchy linework, not
far off the art style embraced by the other Studio 4*C film shown at Annecy Festival the same week, ChaO, or perhaps Taiyo Matsumoto and Shinji Kimura‘s design work on Tekkonkinkreet and its film adaptation (another Studio 4*C film – a pattern emerges).

But even as its playfulness with editing and 3D camerawork and scene-blocking persists, Akimoto’s film keeps drifting back into less interesting choices as the film goes on, both in the story choices and even in the music. The soundtrack gradually abandons the eerie and sparse electronic notes of its early acts to more anonymous orchestral compositions.

As for the story itself, the film’s point isn’t entirely lost, but it undermines itself with the execution of some of its ideas. While this film’s take on character of Keiji is a fun subversion of his image both on page and on screen, the character gets put into a position which ultimately becomes a hijacking of Rita’s arc at the last possible moment, taking a vital choice to out of her hands. In addition, a decision made by one of the characters is undone simply because it requires too many steps, the
impact of the moment is diffused because of how much it takes to get to this point, and by the time it does, there’s no feeling left in it. It’s a shame that a film making such idiosyncratic choices in its merging of 3D and 2D visual languages in animation keeps falling into rather predictable patterns, because for the most part, it’s exciting to watch. Maybe someone will nail it on the next go-around.