'Earthlings in Love': Ueda Shinichiro Turns a Vertical Microdrama Into a Tokyo Feature

Ueda Shinichiro's "Earthlings in Love" screens in the Nippon Cinema Now section of the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, and it arrives by an unusual route. The film began as 30 vertical short episodes on social media, each a few minutes long, before an enthusiastic online response pushed it toward a theatrical feature.

Ueda made his name with "One Cut of the Dead," the cult zombie hit that kept transforming — from single-take horror-comedy into a meditation on filmmaking and the chaos of being on set. His new feature extends that self-reflexive interest into fresh territory: the phone-native microdrama.

The story follows Shinpei, a director diagnosed with young-onset dementia, who sets out to record his memories and finish a film he started shooting with friends as a teenager. Ueda told Variety the premise came from a real encounter: reuniting with old schoolmates in his local town, he noticed they remembered the same events differently, and some things had been forgotten entirely. "I wanted to create a story about the difference between memory and what has been recorded," he said.

Which came first, the format or the script?

"Vertical first, and then we thought of the screenplay," Ueda said. He planned the project as a social media idea from the start, though he admits his instincts lean theatrical. "I think I have more of a nature that fits feature films, and that's what I've been doing."

The vertical frame suits his material in a way that goes beyond fashion. Ueda pointed out that some dementia symptoms limit vision, so the format's cropped edges carry thematic weight. The narrow frame also leaves information out, letting viewers discover it later. "It leaves things to the viewer's imagination," he said. The format works well for shooting one person; group shots bring challenges and restrictions.

What changed between the series and the feature?

Ueda, who edits his own films, gave Variety the concrete numbers. The 30 episodes totaled 76 minutes on social media. The feature runs 111 minutes. Some of the extra material was restored footage and lines that hadn't fit the short-form version; some came from additional shooting. He also cut cliffhanger endings designed to hook viewers into the next day's episode — devices a feature doesn't need.

The biggest shift was rhythm. On social media, "if you make it too slow, they're just going to swipe away to different content," he said. In a theater, the audience is seated and committed, so he could slow down and let the acting breathe for two hours.

Compared with "One Cut of the Dead" and "Special Actors," the vertical frame was the only real difference in approach. Ueda noted that actors in short vertical dramas often overact, but his cast came from feature-film experience, so the performance quality held steady.

Does theater survive the microdrama boom?

Ueda's prior microdramas taught him less about craft than about speed. "As soon as you release something, you see the comments filling up the space on the social media platform," he said. He described an extreme workflow: an idea in the morning, shooting in the daytime, release in the evening — like tweeting. A feature takes at least 12 months of planning before it reaches a theater.

He expects both formats to endure, and the vertical shorts market to keep growing. But he argued theater has one irreplaceable function, at least in Japan: "it is now the only place where people will turn off their phones and sit together for two hours, listening to or watching something." Borrowing a phrase from a senior director friend, he called the cinema "like a church or a sacred place" — a ritual that will stay because nothing else works that way. With "Earthlings in Love," Ueda has now built a single work that tests both spaces at once.