Anime as a documentary is the rarest and most unpopular genre there is out there, you can try and argue this but it won't change the fact that no streaming service that I know of features the tag and google shows really fucking bad documentaries about anime when trying to look them up.

As such I was really intrigued when this thing materialized on my plan to watch list and I quickly found myself laughing at the outdated nonsense being presented as facts, not really all that different from alien "documentaries" you will find on TV today. Hell, given the production value of this thing I actually got a weird YouTube-like vibe from guys that present documentaries and night-time stories using still images.

Here is one thing that I didn't expect though:

IT'S NOT AWFUL

The documentary is perfectly watchable if you like low budget documentaries but don't get me wrong, the low score you'll find for it everywhere is well deserved. It's really inconsistent across the board on every department: the transitions between topics are really sudden, the animation is sometimes great for the era, sometimes it's standard 1970's jank and the art is constantly switching between badly doctored stock images pulled from a folder, drawings from a Crayola advert and really nice looking cels that you could probably set as a poster in a café and they wouldn't look out of place.

##### (All three of these images come from the same show)

The thing that strikes me the most, however, are the aforementioned transitions. The documentary covers 4 anecdotes, the possible appearance of aliens, discusses the different shapes of registered UFO's and talks about ancient aliens (Not even in 1970's anime one can escape that show). All of this in a runtime of 17 minutes, which makes the whole documentary feel all over the place.

Here is a theory of mine on why this show turned up the way it did that honestly interested me more than the documentary itself and led me through some really weird rabbit holes.

Animation is expensive, as such it was absurdly common in the period between the 60's and 80's to avoid scrapping entire projects and instead use the leftover cels for other productions.

My theory here is that this show is a bunch of pilots that were originally made for a TV series put together into a documentary with little care or thought put into it, which although it would explain most (If not all) of the documentary's problems it stills leaves a lot of questions unanswered that I couldn't find the answers for anywhere, such as:

• Did they get permission to use the anecdotes from the people portrayed in the film and if not was there any legal trouble in the production that led to the show being cancelled and turned into a movie?
• Who greenlit the show in the first place
• Why did it get greenlit in the first place
• Is this solely made by Toei? Why does everything looks as inconsistent as other shows that were partially outsourced in the 70's?
• Who did they hire as a consultant?
• Why did they hit the breaks and turn this into a compilation movie?
• Was there some sort of Alien boom in 1970's Japan that was big enough to convince Toei of all corporations to support this?
• Why-