Director – Seishiro Negaya – 2025 – Japan – Cert. tbc – 19m
*****
Aliens love eating humans, and two humans avoid being eaten by disguising themselves as chickens – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June
It’s just another everyday schoolday for Yohei (voice: Kazuki Ura). He gets out of bed. His mum (voice: Emi Shinohara) makes breakfast and tells him not to keep the cute girl Moemi Kaneda (voice: Kimiko Saito) waiting who wants him to walk her to school. She is twice his height. He’s on animal duty, which means that he must ensure the chickens kept in the schoolyard get fed.
This might sound like nothing out of the ordinary, but Yohei’s strange blue skin and odd face tells a different story, as do Moemi’s mandibles. They are aliens who defeated the humans when they invaded Earth in 2019. And they ate most of the humans, who were particularly tasty to aliens. They would love tto eat more, only, apparently, they’ve eaten all the humans.
Somehow, however, two humans Yuto (voice: Kensho Ono) and Ami (voice: Shin Sakurai) have survivived by disguising themselves as chickens, which aliens don’t like the taste of so much. When I say disguised as chickens, what I actually mean is they are wearing costume chicken heads, which since the aliens recognise people and animals by looking at their heads means that aliens ”recognise” them as chickens. Yuto and Ami are the two chickens that Yohei must feed in the schoolyard.
Unfortunately for the two humans, a new student Matsatoshi Endo (voice: Mitsuo Iwata) is about to transfer to the school, and he comes from a planet where they love eating chickens. Suddenly, Yuto and Ami’s precarious existence is threatened…
Although doing the festival rounds as a standalone short, this appears to be the opening episode of ONA (Original Net Animation) anthologyTatsuki Fujimoto 17–26, a series based on stories by manga artist Tatsuki Fujimoto, which can be found worldwide on Amazon, where it appears to be dubbed. At Annecy, we had the privilege of seeing it in Japanese with subtitles, which would be my preferred option as an English language speaker. My appetite for the series has been whetted. Taken as a standlaone film, it works extremely well.
Central to the piece are the humans disguised as chickens, essentially a surreal gag that’s daft enough to be straight out of David Lynch. A human viewer looks at humans wearing chicken costume heads and immediately things, ah, humans, who for some reason are wearing chicken costume heads. The whole dynamic changes when the aliens see through the chicken disguise; suddenly they are fugitives who must head for the mountains where the other humans are hiding, unbeknown to the aliens.
Oh, and the reason the aliens defeated the humans? They can transform into giant monsters (this appears to happen to them when there is a possibility of tasty nourishment, not entirely unlike the feeding frenzy process in a shark).
Negaya’s visuals are almost deadpan in the sense that they could have come from almost any anime about anything featuring Japanese high school. Apart from being alien, and their odd appearance(s), these aliens behave for the most part like high school students everywhere. Which only serves to render the plight of the two humans in the bizarre situation in which they find themselves all the more shocking.
A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.
Trailer (Japanese, no subs):
Trailer for series Tatsuki Fujimoto 17–26 (Japanese, no subs):