English Dub Review: All You Need Is Kill

It’s been common for a while now that anime films are on the rise. When looking at the Wikipedia page for “List of highest-grossing Japanese movies period worldwide”, the top 16 are anime films, and when looking at just the top 8, most of them were released within only the past decade. The 1st two, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train and Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, belong to the same anime/manga series and were only released in the past 5 years. And pretty recently, the hot and popular film review site Letterboxd came out with their “year in review” and the highest rated movie on there last year was the new Chainsaw Man movie. Basically, a lot of teenagers and those slightly older are really into anime (both in the United States and abroad) and using the few opportunities they have to go to the movies with their hard earned money to see these films. Clearly a lot of entries in the medium of Japanese animation are connecting with this demographic in more ways than one; often times in ways that other media is having trouble doing

That isn’t to say that a film like All You Need Is Kill will be in the same ballpark of popularity and awareness, but having seen it, in this instance, it can be easy to tell why if it does.

This film is based on the Japanese science fiction light novel of the same name by author Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which got an official English translation in 2009. This set off in motion the film rights to be picked up by Warner Bros., which eventually resulted in the release of the 2014 film Edge of Tomorrow. Coincidentally, this new anime adaptation has been produced by Warner Bros. Japan. 

Here we see Rita, a girl who is part of a task force set to remove a weird large entity dubbed Darol by the citizens of Earth, which at the time of the film starts has been on Earth for a year now. When going back to her daily routine, a bunch of aliens come out of Darol and start attacking and killing everyone, including Rita. The twist? Rita then wakes up again at the beginning of the day. And again, and again and again. Thus it’s up to Rita to become Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day and figure out how to stop this madness.

I said at the beginning this would have no trouble appealing to teens; the main character is noticeably younger than that of the characters in Edge of Tomorrow, plus the film itself is bright and colorful. The animation studio behind this film is Studio 4°C, who you may recall from such films as Mind Game and Princess Arete, as well as contract work on shows like Transformers: Animated and the 2011 Thundercats series. Visually, though, it has the most in common with the character designs of Tekkonkinkreet. Every character has a weirdly shaped head that makes them distinct from the rest of the cast. There aren’t any big wild shot expressions, but the design alone helps it stand out from most anime films that get licensed out and exported for international theaters. The mixture of CGI and hand-drawn animation is convincing as long as you’re not looking for it.

You get to see a lot of her turmoil and pain as she desperately tries to figure out how to stop this awful thing from happening, as well as how it emotionally connects to her horrid upbringing. Your first instinct is that she is just getting more athletic and getting better at fighting and killing these aliens through muscle memory, but then you realize more is going on than you’d think.

One key difference from both the live-action film and the original novel, is that this time, Rita is the beginning focus rather than someone we are introduced to later on; it’s also certainly the most optimistic of the two adaptations we have so far (not counting the manga adaptation). It’s stuff like this that makes in on par tonally and thematically with the average Makoto Shinkai movie, and my mention of “Makoto Shinkai” is the detriment to whether or not you will enjoy this movie.

Either way, this was an adequate time; the English dub has a mix of longtime voice actors in anime and relative unknowns and that’s represented in the two leads. Stephanie Sheh plays Rita, who is certainly going for that tomboy-ish attitude, much different from the roles of Usagi/Sailor Moon, but in line with characters like Mei from LEGO Monkie Kid. Newcomer Jadon Muniz voices Keiji, and they do a decent job for someone who hasn’t voiced in a production like this before. This is one of those movies where they animated the mouth flaps to the already recorded Japanese dialogue (much like AKIRA), so it can be distracting at times for those who are used to expressive mouth flaps matching the language or just standard mouth flaps in anime. This will be a delight for people who haven’t seen many films like this before.