Twilight of the Cockroaches

Live action and ‘toon; human and roach: Worlds collide in this thought-provoking feature from Hiroaki Yoshida, titled Twilight of the Cockroaches. The protagonists are the comfortably insular roaches who inhabit one crumb-strewn household and their spartan next-door neighbors who live under perpetual attack from exterminating humans. This anthropomorphic-roaches story has love triangles and war scenes, including death by spray can, rolled newspaper, vacuum cleaner, boric-acid avalanche, and the dreaded boot. But Yoshida’s camera moves with the crawlers, so their point of view is yours and the attacks are horrifying — especially since these roaches like humans. Yoshida advocates not insect rights but seeing things from alternate viewpoints. As the survivor of America’s atom bombs becomes America’s economic scapegoat, that message is more urgent than ever. A