Featured Movies
Partners
Minotaur
Rival gangs of kids, Yakuza, cops and aliens clash in a crime-filled fictional city in director Michael Arias' striking anime
This anime has a slightly unusual heritage - like many, it's based on a manga, but what's atypical here is that the writer and director are Americans. Director Michael Arias has lived and worked in Japan for a decade-and-a-half, and his background is in visual effects software. He was one of the producers of The Animatrix, but was a directorial virgin before Tekkonkinkreet (he explains the title as, "a scrambling of the words for 'reinforced concrete'"). It's an impressive film for a first timer, but while the film's visually awesome, Anthony Weintraub's screenplay (adapted from Taiyo Matsumoto's manga) is awkward and unsatisfying. After a stunning opening sequence that introduces what turns out to be the film's special character - the setting itself, Treasure Town - we meet Black and White, two orphans who are the key protagonists. Somehow, these kids (drawn with a distinctively funky style) can leap from rooftop to rooftop and fight like superhumans. In fact, Treasure Town isn't a real city, it's a fascinating hybrid of East Asian and Southeast Asian cities of the 1930s, 1950s and today, with a dash of other stuff - one building even looks like a small cousin of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The older, tougher Black looks after the young, odder White (some kind of idiot savant, or just a kid with arrested development) and between them they vie with an older gang (who are very A Clockwork Orange) and Yakuza for control of the sleazy, corrupt old city. In the mix are a kindly old homeless guy they call Gramps, two pragmatic cops, Fujimura and Sawada, and a very odd character called Snake ("It's really not a good idea to threaten me. My rage is as twisted as my face, and my face is pretty twisted"), who has three over-sized assassins at his beck and call. The latter four are actually aliens, and they're ingratiating themselves with the Yakuza and forging forward with a plan to bulldoze swathes of Treasure Town and build a huge amusement park. Apparently, in the Tekkonkinkreet world, gangsters can profit more from amusements than vice. Still, the schemings of Snake and Co. provide the film's more explicit theme - that ruthless developers compromise a city's character, and ruin the lives of its inhabitants. The more confusing themes are to do with childhood and violence, how kids naturally play violently, but if they give themselves over too it too much, they can become subsumed by violence. Black has the potential to become a monster, as exemplified by the weird Minotaur character he encounters; it seems to be an incarnation of violence, cruelty and corruption - what he might become without the influence of the infantile but humanising White. Whatever Aria and Weintraub are trying to say, they do it against a splendid backdrop. The city is realised with sublime artistry by the team of animators, background artists and CGI artists, among them Shinji Kimura, who is art director here, a role he also filled on the similarly visually impressive Steamboy; he also worked on such classics as Akira and My Neighbour Totoro. The music by British duo Plaid is pretty cool too. Verdict Michael Arias' debut anime feature is so visually arresting that the story shortcomings and confusions are tolerable. With the sound down at a party or nightclub, it'd be mesmerising. |
