Live. Die. Repeat. Live. Die. Repeat. Live. Die. Repeat. Live. Die. Repeat. Before these words were linked to the Doug Liman-directed Edge of Tomorrow (2014), they belonged to Hiroshi Sakurazaka and his light novel All You Need Is Kill. Initially released in 2004 and published by Shueisha (Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine), All You Need Is Kill was only recently adapted as a manga between January – May 2014 ahead of the theatrical release of Edge of Tomorrow. Now, thanks to STUDIO4℃ (Mind Game; Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox) and Warner Bros. Japan (Batman Ninja series), first-time feature director Kenichiro Akimoto (Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko) and writer Yuichiro Kido (April, Come She Will) bring their own interpretation forth in a fully-animated adaptation that bridges together kaleidoscopic animation and sci-fi action with the philosophical weight of existential dread inherent in the story. Having its North American premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival 2025 in the Animation Plus section, All You Need Is Kill brings the full destructive weight of a time loop-based adventure that will have you on the edge of your seat, bracing for sweet release.
Rita voiced by Ai Mikami in ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films/Fantasia International Film Festival. ©桜坂洋／集英社・ALL YOU NEED IS KILL製作委員会.
One year after an extraterrestrial plant dubbed “Darol” crash lands on Earth, the volunteer crews and scientists working the crash site still have no idea what it is or where it came from. As several volunteers get started on their shift to clear debris and roots, an eruption within Darol occurs and plant-like creatures begin to attack everyone. One volunteer, Rita (voiced by Ai Mikami), awkward with the exosuit she wears to work, manages a lucky strike on one of the creatures, dealing a death blow right as it pierces her. At the moment of death, Rita awakens back in her bed, the day of the eruption. She soon realizes that she’s stuck in a time loop, seemingly destined to die and kill and die and kill over and again forever. That is, until she meets someone else, an engineer named Keiji (voiced by Natsuki Hanae), who is stuck, too. Alone, they are fodder for the slaughter, but together, there may be a chance to break free and survive.
The Darol in ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films/Fantasia International Film Festival. ©桜坂洋／集英社・ALL YOU NEED IS KILL製作委員会.
Having not read the original light novel or the manga adaptation, what follows will not include comparisons; however, based on a reading of the summary, it appears that, much like screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth did with Edge of Tomorrow, Kido has done the same with this animated adaptation. The characters are closer to the source with Rita and Keiji at the center, there’s a time loop element, and an alien invasion, but Rita is far from the “Full Metal Bitch” that the original and Edge present and Keiji is not the primary perspective, though his involvement is significant. The question then becomes, why the shift and what does it do for the way one engages the story?
A scene from ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films/Fantasia International Film Festival. ©桜坂洋／集英社・ALL YOU NEED IS KILL製作委員会.
Kido’s script reimagines the circumstances of the narrative away from the battlefield and back to the beginning with a different set of rules and creatures. Here, Rita is young, not even of drinking age, working on cleaning up at the Darol impact site; Keiji is an engineer (not a soldier); and the invasive species is plant-like, rather than fauna. Each of these changes brings forward their own implications both to the narrative and the artistic design. Adapting for the sake of adapting really only works if the vision behind it is specific and holds intent, which Kido and Akimoto seem to possess. Instead of exploring the impact of war and the cycle of death and rebirth on a warrior, it centers Rita, a mere clean-up volunteer dealing with social anxiety as a result of adolescent trauma. Therefore, amid the life cycle she experiences, she’s forced to contend with the very thing that caused her to pull inward in the first place and reevaluate the way in which one engages with the world. This helps separate the initial presentation of Rita as misanthropic as the truth is that she feels too deeply and has been betrayed by someone close to her. What better way to destroy walls and force a confrontation than through the disintegration of time itself which forcibly prevents her from crossing the edge of tomorrow, yanked backward to the same alarm clock and raised voice of a neighbor again and again. Likewise, the shift in character design away from the animal to flora grants unto the Darol a greater other-worldly presence as their soldiers, for lack of a better term, are highly-mobile traps that use their stems like feet and petals as both slashing arms and crunching maws. Humanity has a way of understanding more animalistic tendencies of invaders, but to apply such rules to plants seems unrealistic, making the Darol all the more other-y. Tools and tactics function one way with an animal, but how does someone like Rita intimidate a plant? By altering the enemy and Rita’s age (and circumstances), her central starting point is even further than the source material, necessitating her to work even harder to overcome. Smartly, Kido and Akimoto utilize a few time loop tropes to demonstrate Rita’s improvements without requiring a full reset (from our perspective) each time, a choice which also provides a little bit of humor in an otherwise horrifying situation.
Keiji voiced by Natsuki Hanae in ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films/Fantasia International Film Festival. ©桜坂洋／集英社・ALL YOU NEED IS KILL製作委員会.
What’s truly exciting about this adaptation is that it’s in animation, a medium which allows for greater freedom in the creation of a world than live-action often does. Producer Warner Bros. Japan has worked on live-action titles like Blade of the Immortal (2017) and the Rurouni Kenshin series, but also animated stories like Summer Wars (2009) and the Batman Ninja films. While the animation here isn’t as exaggerated as some of WBJ’s collaborations with Kamikaze Douga (Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound & Fury), animation house STUDIO4℃ has experience with utilizing a singular visual style (Batman: Gotham by Gaslight), anthologies with differing styles (The Animatrix), and straight-up mixed-media (Mind Game), brining the skillset required to incorporate multiple visual styles in a manner that will captivate you visually while breaking your heart open narratively in All You Need is Kill. One can’t help but think of Forbidden Planet (1956) when watching this through Akimoto’s use of depth, giving places and things at a distance a more locked-in look compared to the more flexible and flowing movements of the characters in the foreground, while the overall color scheme from color designer Konoha Suzuki (Children of the Sea) evokes Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 – 2021) with its use of stark whites and bleeding reds. Art director Tomotaka Kubo (The Imaginary; Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time) even manages to find opportunities for dynamic color while keeping them distinct from each other, such as with the flower creatures and how one can look at them and see the discrete colors of purple, red, yellow, orange, and black, even with the slight ombre as the colors go from one end of a petal to another. Darol itself is a collection of colors presented in an iridescent stalk with white roots. Conversely, Rita, Keiji, and the rest of the humans are more muted in presentation, not quite absent of richness, but devoid of vibrancy. The colors are a lot like their lives, filled with endless repetition, even before the loop begins. Another motif Akimoto uses, albeit briefly and shown in the teaser, will immediately make audiences think of Shinji Ikari (voiced by Megumi Ogata), a seemingly ill-fated young man at the center of a battle between angels and humanity, thereby gifting unto Rita, designed by character designer Izumi Murakami, a retro-futuristic look that harkens back to Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno’s own designs, enabling this tale to tap into the emotional cache Shinji developed in his respective story. Rita lacks Shinji’s depressive states and social awkwardness, but she remains a character thrust into a situation where she’s forced to make life-and-death choices. The art design and use of traditional animation with 3D makes the world that Rita inhabits familiar and distant, regardless of the sci-fi elements involved that give the film an unclear time, even if in a very familiar place.
Shasta voiced by Kana Hanazawa in ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films/Warner Bros. Japan. ©桜坂洋／集英社・ALL YOU NEED IS KILL製作委員会.
This, then, brings us back to why the changes. It’s rare, still, to see a female take the lead in sci-fi. Even with Ellen Ripley, Buffy Summers, Katniss Everdeen, and Momo Ayase making big impacts in popular culture, it’s a rarity to find a female character who’s not either secondary to a male character, only emotional support for a male character, or merely present for a male character’s romantic purposes. By shifting Rita into the primary perspective, the root of the choice to fight back comes not from an expected place doused in masculinity, but from personal rage. She’s furious when people don’t listen to her upon the third round (the point where she realizes she’s looping and not dreaming); she’s furious at the growing sense of impotence given her skillset and knowledge; and she’s furious at the feeling of being stuck, trapped even, within a system she can’t navigate away from. In a strange way, altering the aliens from animals to plants makes the most sense as it, likewise, transfers the expected delivery mechanism of violence into something one believes to be a passive system. With these conflicts in place, Kido and Akimoto deliver the expected repetitious fights, failures, and successes within a fresh perspective and arc.
Rita voiced by Ai Mikami in ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films/Fantasia International Film Festival. ©桜坂洋／集英社・ALL YOU NEED IS KILL製作委員会.
Adaptations are tricky regardless of the source material and its medium of origin. Transposing one form of media onto another, like novel to cinema or feature to television, brings with it expectations that can cripple a project before it’s completed and presented. Look to the early superhero films like Steel (1997) or video game adaptations like Max Payne (2008) and you’ll find half-baked costumes and plotlines to match when the source material was far richer and more detailed. Even trying to match the source 1:1 comes with its own problems as things like narration, which gave the audience a profound understanding of a character’s struggles, can come off clunky elsewhere unless in text. Therefore, making changes is often necessary and the best ones provide justification for their changes within the text of the adaptation. Akimoto’s choice to change both the protagonist and the antagonist of the story provides a unique viewpoint to begin from, enabling the whole of All You Need Is Kill to reinvent itself within the expected narrative framework. While this might disappoint audiences hoping for a 1:1 transposition, luckily, this is not a Spawn (1997), or worse, Super Mario Bros. (1993), situation where the choices were responses to budgets but were, instead, directly influenced by the intention of the filmmakers to craft something new. Even with the framework being known, there remains enough unknown to make the effort of experiencing All You Need Is Kill more than worthwhile.
Screening during Fantasia International Film Festival 2025.
In theaters January 16th, 2026.
For more information, head either to the official All You Need Is Kill Fantasia International Film Festival webpage or film website.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews
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