uri Otani emphatically did not ask to be an alien fighter—as far as she's concerned, her sixth-grade class just elected her to the position because no one else wanted to do the job. Which seems a little strange. Alien fighters get to skip class all the time, and zoom around the school on rollerblades with symbiotic talking aliens on their heads. During the frequent alien invasions, while everyone else is in class, alien fighters are running around school with dart guns or lacrosse rackets, containing the threat. It seems like a position that almost any elementary-school kid would want.
But not Yuri. She's terrified of aliens, and whenever she's confronted with one, she curls up, bawls and wails "I'm scared!" over and over. Which signals her Borg—a giant, red, winged, froglike thing that she wears like a protective helmet—to save her from danger by messily slaughtering the threat. Which earns Yuri lectures from the Alien Party advisor, Megumi Hisakawa, who points out that the aliens' lives must be respected. Yuri's frequent collapses also annoy or concern her school's other elected alien fighters, resigned leader Kumi Kawamura and energetic prodigy Kasumi Tomine.
But that's life in Alien Nine, a four-episode partial adaptation of a manga series in which alien "attacks" are so common that "alien fighter" is a run-of-the-mill classroom position, right up there with homeroom monitors and lost-and-found managers. At least, that's life on the surface. It's obvious that something else is going on behind the scenes, since Megumi and the school's principal both show some of the same odd powers as the froglike Borg, and Megumi seems to actually be ordering the aliens from an online retailer before each attack, and chatting about each combat afterward as though it's all part of a big contest. Clearly, there's more to the story than meets the eye. But Alien Nine fans will have to read the manga to get more of the story, since at present the four episodes included on this disc are all there is.
Cute, weird, touching and gross
Alien Nine is a study in conflicts, and not just the conflicts between elementary-school students and aliens. The character design is odd, even for anime—with their moon-shaped chins, lack of noses, oversized ears and giant eyes with distorted, vertical-slit pupils, Yuri and her compatriots look like the offspring of Rankin-Bass Gollums and Tove Jansson's Moomintrolls. The series' washed-out pastels and cute, cartoony stylings make it seem like a simplified children's show, but the subject matter gets grim and grotesque fairly early on, and it keeps topping itself throughout until it seems like the series is trying to compete with Neon Genesis Evangelion for the "Most Alien Blood Spilled" award. The cheery pop-music sequences, which resemble music videos, emphasize teamwork and friendship, while a vacation interlude shows the girls' playful human side and lets them bond. But where another series would show Yuri drawing on these positive experiences and living up to the challenges in her life, Alien Nine takes a much darker and more unconventional turn.
Add in Yuri's bizarre psychedelic dreams, and the distinctly trippy Borg, who remonstrate with their human charges when they're not sending waves of prehensile, computer-animated drill-tips skimming through the air to skewer things, and Alien Nine turns into a teary, hallucinogenic drug trip. Yuri's definitely the wet blanket of the series—her repetitive wailing gets old before the first episode is over, but at least it has interesting and unpredictable consequences. All of which makes watching Alien Nine a queasy but exciting experience—it's impossible to guess what will happen next. That tends to put the series a cut above other, more traditional genre exercises, sticking it into the same bizarre category as the series producers' other hit, Excel Saga—except this time with a coherent story.
And fans can get more of that story in a few months, with Central Park Media's Alien Nine "Ultimate Edition," which will include this DVD and all three of the series' existing manga collections. Until more episodes are animated, that's probably the best way to satisfy the itch created by the initial taste of this weird but enjoyably different series.
It's disappointing that the series doesn't have an ending, but Central Park Media compensates with a nice package of typical but well-realized extras: sketch and art galleries, an extensive collection of trailers and teasers (both for Alien Nine and for other CPM series), a short interview with producer Taro Maki and more.
— Tasha
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