A few years ago, the Japanese Anime world was considered with contempt by most of the critics and cinema lovers. Miyazaki wasn't well known and "Akira", despite all its qualities, stayed a counterculture product that was only a celebration of teenage sex and violence, without any aesthetically virtues. But when the intellectual occidental world understood that Rintaro, the man who directed "Captain Harlock" was also able to make "Metropolis", or that the Studio Ghibli produced quality Animes since many years, things started to change. Hollywood rapidly incorporated Anime visual grammar in some of its most experimental works (Animatrix in witch Michael Arias participated - Kill Bill...) and some of the most exigent Anime directors were able to express themselves in the most prestigious world festivals : Satoshi Kon (who's recent "Paprika" has a lot of common points with "Tekkon Kinkreet" and was nominated in the last Venice festival), Hideaki Anno (who directed "Evangelion" but also some experimental movies like "Love and Pop") or Katsuhito Ishii (who's masterpiece, "The Taste of tea" is full of Manga/Anime references and also was in the Cannes film festival). In a few years time, Japanese Anime become one of the most exigent and experimental cinema, and "Tekkon Kinkreet" is another proof of this metamorphosis.
This is not really a critical judgment upon Anime, it's just a observation that, from "Dragon Ball" to "Tekkon", it's not really the quality of Japanime that has changed, but mostly our point of view on it. And if a movie like that can make its way to our occidental screen, it's only because after "Parika", "Ghost in the Shell : Innocence" or "My Neighbors the Yamadas" we're now ready for this kind of experience. We accept the fact that a Cartoon could aim an adult audience and that it could be an interesting intellectual performance, like watching a Tarkovki or a Godard movie, more than just a piece of popular culture.
The visual style of "Tekkon" is already fascinating : the drawings of the manga are perfectly respected and that give on screen a strange mix of cartoonist, almost caricatures, figures and realistic settings, childish drawings and complex camera construction : in its style, the movie already appears like a oxymoron. And the thematic of the movie will develops this original aesthetically style. The story revolves around two kids with powers that fight a yakusa gang who wants to get the control of their city. But that doesn't really matter (and to tell the truth, the story is quite hard to fallow, for the symbolic issues the movie deals with are much more interesting), for the real fight will be within the characters (who are called Black and White), which are themselves metaphors of the childhood and of its contradictions.
There no doubt that all this is really interesting and that the great achievement of the movie is that it always manages to stay at the frontier between a popular entertainment movie (it has a story, some big and impressive fights, it uses some of the classical manga codes) and a experimental film d'auteur (by its original visual style and its strong symbolic). But the funny thing is that the "Auteur" part really comes from the writer Matsumoto Taiyo, and that it's an interesting movie only thanks to its fidelity to the manga's style and thematic.
This is not really a critical judgment upon Anime, it's just a observation that, from "Dragon Ball" to "Tekkon", it's not really the quality of Japanime that has changed, but mostly our point of view on it. And if a movie like that can make its way to our occidental screen, it's only because after "Parika", "Ghost in the Shell : Innocence" or "My Neighbors the Yamadas" we're now ready for this kind of experience. We accept the fact that a Cartoon could aim an adult audience and that it could be an interesting intellectual performance, like watching a Tarkovki or a Godard movie, more than just a piece of popular culture.
The visual style of "Tekkon" is already fascinating : the drawings of the manga are perfectly respected and that give on screen a strange mix of cartoonist, almost caricatures, figures and realistic settings, childish drawings and complex camera construction : in its style, the movie already appears like a oxymoron. And the thematic of the movie will develops this original aesthetically style. The story revolves around two kids with powers that fight a yakusa gang who wants to get the control of their city. But that doesn't really matter (and to tell the truth, the story is quite hard to fallow, for the symbolic issues the movie deals with are much more interesting), for the real fight will be within the characters (who are called Black and White), which are themselves metaphors of the childhood and of its contradictions.
There no doubt that all this is really interesting and that the great achievement of the movie is that it always manages to stay at the frontier between a popular entertainment movie (it has a story, some big and impressive fights, it uses some of the classical manga codes) and a experimental film d'auteur (by its original visual style and its strong symbolic). But the funny thing is that the "Auteur" part really comes from the writer Matsumoto Taiyo, and that it's an interesting movie only thanks to its fidelity to the manga's style and thematic.