Vibe
Shunji Iwai’s first animated feature begins with the premise of a schoolyard murder mystery and gradually reveals that the real mystery is how two odd, lonely middle-school girls become friends. Alice has just transferred to a new school where a rumor persists about a murdered classmate called “Judas.” Hana, the reclusive girl living next door, supposedly knows what happened. The investigation grows increasingly ridiculous, but Iwai plays the girls’ embarrassment, improvisation and curiosity with such close attention that the absurdity becomes a vehicle for character rather than plot mechanics. The film is technically a prequel to Iwai’s 2004 live-action *Hana & Alice*, yet it works without that background because the entire dramatic point is the first meeting. Animation lets Iwai bring the original actresses’ voices back while making adolescent bodies move with a strange mixture of naturalism and looseness. The rotoscope-derived motion can initially feel uncanny, but that awkwardness suits characters who are not yet comfortable in their own social identities. The movie is funny without becoming a gag machine and warm without forcing instant intimacy. Its best passages—Alice wandering the city, spying badly, inventing explanations, or simply sharing space with Hana—understand that friendship can form sideways, through a series of small practical conspiracies rather than a single declaration.
Watch for
- Watch the body language before you watch the dialogue. Because Iwai built movement from filmed performances and 3D reference, the girls slouch, stumble, hesitate and occupy awkward space in ways conventional limited animation often simplifies.
- The “murder” premise keeps shrinking as the friendship grows. Notice how the movie gradually transfers your attention from solving Judas to observing how Alice and Hana learn to cooperate, lie for each other and enjoy being ridiculous together.
- Iwai’s city spaces matter. Trains, sidewalks, houses and school corridors are not generic backdrops; they give the girls room to wander and make mistakes, producing the loose everyday rhythm associated with his live-action youth films.
- Pay attention to how comedy comes from delay. The film often lets an embarrassing situation continue a little longer than expected, resisting fast punchlines and allowing the characters’ panic or overconfidence to become the joke.
Production notes
Iwai wrote the animated prequel years before he finally found a workable production method. In interviews he explained that he was comfortable directing live actors but less interested in instructing animators abstractly about every movement, so he filmed performances and converted them into animation. The production used both conventional rotoscoping and 3D character models laid over filmed reference rather than motion-capture sensors. Iwai estimated that roughly 70 percent of the main-character animation used 3D models and about 30 percent used traced rotoscope work. The workflow itself was unconventional. Iwai said Japan had little established infrastructure for the exact approach he wanted, so the team had to work out data handling, correction and scheduling as they went. He recruited artists from around the country online; around 150 people sent files digitally, and he worked from home rather than a conventional centralized studio. He connected the project to lessons learned on the earlier rotoscoped work *Baton* and to his reaction against anime movement becoming too standardized. Nippon TV’s catalog confirms the 100-minute feature, February 20, 2015 Japanese release, returning voices Yu Aoi and Anne Suzuki, and production by Rockwell Eyes and Steve N’ Steven.
Trivia
- The film reunites Yu Aoi and Anne Suzuki as the voices of Alice and Hana roughly a decade after they played the same characters in Iwai’s 2004 live-action feature.
- Iwai has said that most of the actors whose physical performances became animation were not the same performers who supplied the final voices; recording voices took far less time than filming a month of movement reference.
- The director cited Ralph Bakshi’s *American Pop* as an important encounter with rotoscoping because its movement offered an alternative to what he saw as increasingly standardized Japanese animation patterns.
- Iwai estimated a budget of roughly 250 million yen in a 2016 interview and described a production involving around 200 people overall, including the large distributed drawing and modeling team.
- The “murder” in the title is intentionally disproportionate to the girls’ investigation. The film uses adolescent rumor-making as comic structure while functioning primarily as an origin story for their friendship.
Legacy
The film’s legacy is less about commercial impact than about method and tone. It sits in a small but important lineage of Japanese features that question the visual assumptions of mainstream character animation. Its mixture of rotoscoping, 3D reference and drawn surfaces does not aim at literal realism; instead, it captures the unpredictable timing of live bodies while keeping faces and environments stylized. That combination has become more interesting with time as contemporary features such as *Ghost Cat Anzu* have pursued related live-action-to-animation workflows for very different effects. It also broadens the idea of what counts as “anime cinema.” Iwai came from live action, music videos, television and composition rather than a conventional animation-director career, and the film retains his habits: drifting youth, pop melancholy, observational comedy, urban texture and an interest in how teenagers invent private worlds. Critics who respond to it often note how quickly the technique stops calling attention to itself because the writing and performances take over. The film has consequently become a discovery title—one that animation viewers recommend to people interested in formal experiment, and Iwai fans recommend to people who might not otherwise seek out anime.