The OVA follows three elementary school students who have been selected to be their school’s alien hunting squad. There’s Kumi, a girl much more mature and responsible than most kids her age, and a big sister-like figure to her friends and classmates. Kasumi, an accomplished child-prodigy, who volunteered herself to be part of the school’s alien hunting squad. And then there’s Yuri, a timid cry-baby who was selected by her classmates to be part of the alien hunting squad because she didn’t participate in any other school clubs or activities, and the show’s main focal point. The girls aided by aliens called Borgs, which perch themselves on the girls’ heads like hats, and supervised by the cheerful Ms. Hisakawa, who seems too enthusiastic to push the girls to hunt aliens.
Now, if this situation off to you, it’s because it is. It does pit little girls against aliens, after all. Though it may not appear so strange at first, partly because this kind of thing is commonplace in anime, but also because the show introduces the premise as nonchalant and matter-of-fact. Nobody ever questions the ethics of sending little girls to catch dangerous aliens, Ms. Hisakawa seems to be more pre-occupied with monitoring and taking the girls than the safety of the girls. Early on, the show itself treats some of the alien encounters with a certain lack of seriousness and urgency, often showing them in fun little montages, as if to intentionally downplay the severity of the situation. Even Yuri’s scaredy-cat tendencies are played for some laughs. The show takes advantage of the tropes of the medium to fool the audience into thinking it’s a fun little show, and not questioning the bizarre and unethical nature of what is demanded of the girls.
Of course, it the show doesn’t stay this way for too long, as the danger the girls are in become very apparent and the show’s content becomes progressively more disturbing. After some events that would traumatize any elementary school student, the show stops treating Yuri’s crying fits as comical and more as the harsh and horrifying truth of the situation. Yuri, for all her crying, is right to be scared; serving as the anxious fear-ridden heart of the show. She’s a shy, timid girl forced against her own will to fight aliens and continuously pressured to do so despite her objections. She even starts having nightmares about her ordeals, which are colorful and even child-like depictions of her rational fears. The contrast between the cartoony visual direction and the darker thematic content of the show make the experience even more bizarre and unsettling. Even when the show is at its most surreal and violent, the art retains a certain cutesiness which makes it all the more sinister.
Yuri isn’t the only one that suffers psychologically as the show progresses, however. Mature and confident Kumi, whom Yuri heavily relies on, and even the enthusiastic Kasumi have their own mental and emotional scars. Their familial issues and struggles with responsibility and loneliness are just as relatable as Yuri’s fear, if not even more so. Unfortunately, the OVA’s short episode count only allows a very light examination of their psyches. This inconclusiveness envelops the OVA as a whole; the plot largely goes unexplained and left with a lot of loose ends, including a cryptic final shot which is frustrating on multiple levels. Regrettably, this severely undercuts the show’s impact. For its ambitions, Alien 9 suffers from a curious lack of purpose. It succeeds in subverting commonly used tropes and weaving a grim tale from a cutesy aesthetic, but the hanging plot and rushed catharsis leaves a certain lack of fulfillment as the OVA ends. Sadly, this ultimately devalues what the show accomplishes to an extent, making it a half-fulfilled promise of what it could have been.
The show was produced in the early 2000s, a time when anime was transitioning from hand-drawn cells to digital cells, and it’s pretty easy to tell just by looking at the show. The digital coloring and animation was not the most refined, certainly not as refined as the anime series of the mid-2000s onward. It’s colorful and animated well, but the show doesn’t really pop visually outside of a few creepy surreal moments. The character designs are very purposely made cutesy, with emphasis on the characters round and expressive faces. The alien designs look more weird than threatening; they look appropriately otherworldly, but also oddly unmemorable. The Borgs in particular are peculiar looking, being frog-like creatures with wings that double as hats. The music, like everything else in the show, is deceptively light and bouncy. Mostly composed of xylophone, bells, flutes, and electronic beats, it’s an energetic soundtrack that progressively gets stranger as the show delves into darker material.
Alien 9 is a nifty little oddity that has unfortunately become obsolete as time has passed. Its deceptive façade of cute characters and wacky hijinks with more sinister intentions it hides makes the OVA quite a novelty. Unfortunately, it never actually develops or expands on its themes, characters, or plot. This really diminishes the show’s value to little more than an interesting idea. This lack of development compounded with the upsurge of darker magical girl series pretty much ensure that Alien 9 is doomed to be an obscure novelty from the early 2000s, and nothing more.
