Tekkon kinkurîto

Plot synopsis:
While the manga follows multiple plot threads, the film adaption consists of a few plots shown in the manga.
The film follows two orphans, Kuro (クロ "Black") and Shiro (シロ "White"), as they attempt to keep control of the streets of the pan-Asian metropolis of Takaramachi, once a flourishing town and now a huge, crumbling slum fraught with warring between criminal gangs. Kuro is a violent and streetwise punk, considering Takaramachi to be "his town". Shiro is younger and appears to be mentally impaired, out of touch with the world around him and often living in a world of illusions. They call themselves "the Cats". Despite their extreme differences, they complement and support each other, similar to the Chinese Taoist principle of yin and yang.
During one of their "missions", they take on thugs and Kuro ends up beating up three Yakuza gang members who are menacing a street gangster friend of his. The Yakuza work for Snake (蛇), the head of a corporation called "Kiddy Kastle". Snake plans to tear down and rebuild Takaramachi as a theme park to fit his own goals and dreams. When Kuro interferes once too often, Yakuza are sent to kill him, but fail. Angered, Snake then sends the deadly "three assassins", near-superhuman hitmen, to finish the job.
In order to save Kuro and himself, Shiro has to kill the first assassin by tipping gasoline and setting it alight, burning him alive. The second assassin pursues Shiro and stabs him with a samurai sword. Shiro is then sent to the hospital. The police, who have been watching both Snake and the two youngsters, decide to take Shiro into protective custody "for his own good", while Kuro watches Shiro go knowing he would be too hard to look after while being hunted. Kuro later falls into a depressive state.
Alongside the children's narrative is a story is told through the eyes of Kimura (木村), an average man who gets caught up in the Yakuza, leading him to have a violent encounter with Kuro. Eventually, Kimura is forced by Snake to kill his former boss and mentor, Suzuki (鈴木), to remove possible competition. While Kimura fulfills his mission, he is deeply shocked by having murdered his mentor. Summoned once again by Snake, Kimura rebels and kills the Yakuza boss, before attempting to flee with his pregnant wife from Takaramachi. He is gunned down in a drive-by shooting by Snake's men.
While the police feel it is for the best for Shiro to remain with them outside Takaramachi, Shiro feels empty without Kuro there for support. In parallel, without Shiro, Kuro soon begins to lose grip on reality and allows his violence to consume him. He soon develops a split personality, with his dark side manifesting as the "minotaur". Things reach a climax when Shiro is brought back to Takaramachi by one of the officers and taken to a local fair. There, a delusional Kuro is trying to show people that "Shiro", in reality a mocked-up doll, has returned to life. When Kuro is attacked by Snake's two remaining assassins, the doll is damaged and Kuro flies into a murderous rage, killing the assassins. It is then that he is confronted by the real Shiro, and is forced to fight the "minotaur", who wishes to completely consume him. Kuro manages to triumph over his dark side and reunites with Shiro.

Tags: psychedelic, atmospheric, violence, sentimental

Review:
"Tekkonkinkreet", literally translated as reinforced concrete, is an hypnotic experience set upon the kaleidoscopic drop of some truly gorgeous drawings which tells the tale of two street urchins as they do battle with an array of colourful characters in order to defend their city from being taken over.
Adapted from the three volume manga series by Taiyo Matsumoto, the film doesn't usually carry the infuriating hallmarks of a manga-to-anime switch over, which can often make the film an unenjoyable experience as the viewer struggles to come to terms with the story and characters and in the process miss the film.
Ostensibly, it is a boys film as the premise bases itself on gangster films as our two street urchin protagonists, the aptly named "Black" and "White" find themselves coming into contact with an ever escalating array of Yakuza as they try to take over the ridiculously sublime "Treasure Town".
Tekkonkinkreet successfully delivers on appeasing any and all who are looking for high quality hand drawn animation which surpasses the eternally vapid conveyor belt of repetitiveness that is Pixar, but it also delivers on being more than just a "fighting" film.The intrinsic parts of Tekkonkinkreet prove in being the messages the director and original creator are wishing to convey to their audiences, of which there are two major points.
"Black" is the streetwise member of the "Cats", as they are known within the city, as he has a savvy and cunning which has enabled he and white to be high on the Treasure Town food chain.
Tekkonkinkreet is a highly charged emotional film, which looks at characters interactions and dependence on each other the yings and yangs within the city itself, the coming together of old and new and more evidently, people's desire for power.
Tekkonkinkreet is a highly successful anime, which blends together elements of crime, violence, humour and fantasy creating a cerebral journey for the senses as director Michael Arias superbly transcribes this moralistic tale with an energetic style of directing which perhaps possesses some of the best and "coolest" "reveal" shots in recent times.
Tekkkonkinkreet is an absorbing adventure which transcends genres and blurs styles in a hot pot of beautiful angst and proves itself to be worth a watch for any who allows themselves to be enveloped by a world which is never told in black and white..
Brothers Black and White are orphans and run the streets of Treasure Town, doing what Cats do best, stealing and running.
This film had very interesting art, childish of a sort, but designed for the sake of experimentation, and to remind us that we're in a story that is seen and narrated by children.
I guess with Japanese anime, some come with a huge dose of the fantastical, and you might not catch all in one screening, leading to longevity as you discover something new each time you view the movie.
The story centers on 2 orphans, Black and White, who are essentially the Cat clan, guarding their city Treasure Town from perceived external threats.
It's like Gotham City, only brighter, messier, and of course, without the Dark Knight, now instead, having Black and White play vigilante, Batman and Robin style.
In between the fights are the quieter moments of course, with subplots that put the spotlight on the myriad of Yakuza characters, and the brotherly love shared between Black and White, who share a dream of an idyllic life at the beach house, where they can live in peace from the unnecessary bustle of the city, and from the trouble that comes looking for them.Based on the manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, I suspect there being a need to read up and do some research in order to appreciate this movie more.
Hyperknetic animation helps along a sometimes too sprawling narrative of homeless street kids White and Black who leap from building to building in the neon streets of Treasure Town.Treasure Town looks like an abandoned psychedelic amusement park that's been over run with urban sprawl (which is pretty much the center theme of the film, the lose of balance, lose of innocence, illustrated through the symbolically named White and Black).
Actually almost all of the characters have names reflecting some kind of duality, "Choco" and "Vanilla", "Dusk" and "Dawn" etc.Black is the muscle, somber and always ready to fight to defend "his town" While White is the more innocent, slightly brain damaged younger of the two who can't dress himself but can leap from the backs of moving cars, like la parkour runners bitten by radioactive spiders.
The first ten minutes of which, are the best moments in the movie(and no it is never explained how they can fly, leap, fight as they do, so much so it's easy to forget how vulnerable as children they are, which is used to get effect).The trouble comes when there's too many Yakuza characters given too much back story, too much over inflated psychodrama with Black attempting to rid himself of his solitary monster like Minetaur persona (this time a Greek myth of the bull monster locked in the labyrinth), and not enough explanation of who the mysterious villain was, who were his henchmen refereed to as both "killing machines" and "aliens" more than once, and what if any connection did he have to re-developing the town, killing the kids, his mission from God, and the mysterious organization who lent him the monsters?
The best part of this movie is its heart felt story between the two brothers Black and White.
Black and White watch over the city they live in called Treasure City, in a gang called the cats.
It is the city itself that rules the film, and these passionate animators do not disappoint when it comes to delivering scene after scene showcasing an unfathomable detail rendered in these massive, severely inspired cityscapes.First time Director Michael Arias does stumble a bit at times, making the episodic material feel that way, but we do see a compelling fusion with CGI effects in many of the action scenes that make this visually stimulating feast rise to fluidly spectacular levels.
I don't mean that in a bad way, its just that trying to describe this film is not at all easy.Tekkonkinkreet is the story of two kids named Black and White.
As a year goes by a yakuza captain returns to the city and a man named Snake appears with his eye on turning that part of the city into an amusement park.I'm explaining it badly, forgive me, since this is a film thats better to experience than to hear about.
The animation to this movie is bizarre but yet very vivid at the same time to the point of where you're saying exactly what I said in my summary: "Wow!" The storyline is where it continues to get better.
Nevertheless, although Tekkonkinkreet is rated R and very violent, it's still a great movie that I truly believe any anime fan will come to love..
If not quite the genius level of Miyazaki, this is still different, thoughtful and original.It involves two 13 year old boys, Black and White, who live in a run down imaginary city, and who have to fight developers who want to take the city over, and in the process destroy it.
Obvious and heavy handed on a symbolic level, ('Black' and 'White' as character names?) some of the animation is breathtakingly beautiful, although the faces of the characters lack a certain expressivity.
It's such a visual piece, that seeing it in any lesser way makes it likely to miss the film's greatest strengths..
The story, based on the comic book by Taiyo Matsumoto, focuses on two homeless orphans, one named Black and the other White, who live on the streets of Treasure Town, a seething cauldron of criminality, vice and corruption.
Thanks to Black's insistence on taking on the bad guys, both youngsters get caught up in a turf war between the Yakuza and some robot-like killers who are duking it out for ownership of the city.Fans of anime will find much to enjoy in this film, which is marked by beautifully detailed urban landscapes, exciting action and chase sequences, occasional lyrical flights into fantasy, and a sometimes touching tale about commitment and friendship centered on the two young boys.
On the other hand, the plethora of characters and occasional narrative incoherence can make it difficult at times to understand what exactly is going on, particularly when the story takes a decidedly metaphysical turn (with imagery taken straight out of "Contact") in the final half hour.
When people think of the destruction of Tokyo or other major Japanese cities, most of them think Godzilla, but there is a more thorough, more devastating way in which formerly rural Japanese towns turn into metropolises, annihilating old ways of life.I felt that this film, as Godzilla was at its time, was a metaphor for that destruction.
This is not a cute little battle with mystical fluffy creatures like Pom Poko, but a fully R-rated brutal film, yet it somehow manages to send the same message as we see alien-like corporate interests destroying the way of life of a city, in such a way that makes toy factories appear as the most evil thing in the world and Yakuza gangsters as the heroes of the story.The animation is weird, but also really well done.
The film doesn't waste time trying to convince you of the reality of what happens and the animation style itself tells you from the start that you need to look at the symbolism of the film, not at the gravity defying acrobatics of street children or for the explanation why some hired killers can fly and are apparently unbeatable.I liked it and felt saddened by it.
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).
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.
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..
One i cared about, and another one that made me bore.the city:there are strong visual ideas behind the good Japanese animations.
We have a city, which is magnificent, coloured but dark (and, as the two main characters, 'black' and 'white').
Black and White, the film revolves around the connection between them, and we have some other lines to follow around.
Black and White, two brothers, claim to own Treasure Town, the city where they live.
But things spiral out of control for Black and White when they are forced to defend themselves (and their city) from not only the Yakuza but a dark, more sinister and supernatural evil.A lot was said about 'Tekkonkinkreet', which is why I thought it would be a good movie to see.
Which isn't good.But here's why the film is still worth watching – the animation.
Yep, I ended up having to watch the second half the next day, simply because I just couldn't enjoy the movie enough to stay awake.'Tekkonkinkreet' suffers from a story that maybe can't be condensed into a screenplay, and I will safely presume that the original comic is probably fantastic.
A very interesting style to the animation; quite simplistic in a way, some of the cityscapes reminded me a little of the work of the artist L.
When the Yakuza plan to take over the city and rid it of the verminous street-kids, Black must fight to protect White and claim the city as his own.Imagine my delight at learning of the existence of this film.
Visual theme 10/10 The plot surrounds the battle of two brothers, Black and White (Kuro and Shiro, originally) against the maleficent undercurrent of Yakuzas, aspiring to take over Treasure Town.
In every flashing image you will see, it will unfold another aspect, another side of a character and raise the question about modern life morals, through a somewhat bizarre and dark storytelling.Tekkon Kinkreet is, by all means, a beautiful story about love.
The title, Tekkon kinkurîto, is derived from the author's personal experience of not being able to pronounce "Tekkin konkurito" (reinforce concrete) as a child but he said "Tekkon kinkurito" instead.An orphan as well as a street kid, Black (Kuro), lives almost like a homeless person, using violence as one of his means for livelihood.
White always wears funny clothes, and looks a little mentally retarded, but he is also a good fighting supporter for Black.
Black and White: Innocence and brutality, joy an sorrow, fun and pain.There is no better way to describe this film, which in w wonderful way, manages to combine the most opposite elements (From the naive, exaggerated elements from the anime martial arts with characters with superpowers, to the nostalgic sadness of movies like "The Grave of the Fireflies") in order to create something unique and captivating.In this movie there are moments of intense violence, but also moments of sweet tenderness: Just like "Pan's Labyrinth" the most innocent things seem to appear in the same world where the most terrible things could happen.
(Though this movie is somewhat more optimistic) Many scenes from this film were memorable and mind-blowing: Some of them were examples of the most beautiful and unique kind of animation that I've seen in the recent years.
The character design is very original too, and in it is considerably different from any other anime I've saw before.Michael Arias made a incredible work in this film.
So apparently it's about these two orphans named Black and White, who make up a gang called the cats who run the city of treasure island.
The characters names: Black and white, seriously?
The supporting cast is not all that great either, there's a yakuza member who has no real point to having a story arc; although the scene with his boss is really good, which by the way the mob boss is one of the few characters I liked.
Talking to Black about how he'd be so much better without white, and I already know how's this is going to end so it's watch watching at this point, and then it finally ends somehow with the two at the beach like White always wanted.
Please note I wanted to like this film; and I do to an extent, but the overall obvious thematic elements and lack of interesting characters makes this not anything special..
but what i felt and found the most beautiful thing about this movie is its deeper meanings of the relation between black and white.i knew the names would have a meaning and to the end of the film it comes together.
Black and white are two kids who grew up together, helping each other protecting "there" city.
With a beautiful scenario, animation and and very wonderful score and soundtrack (which actually I liked more than the movie itself) Its an enjoyable movie but it has something in the plot and the way they create the movie that made it hard to watch.
(besides being obviously annoying and dizzying) However, the overall movie was quite good and watch-able, recommended for people who has seen anime before though..
Orphans Kuro and Shiro (Black and White) live in Treasure Town, a violent city where various groups vie for control.
Apart the two of them find life difficult; Shiro is in care and spends his time drawing and Kuro gets more and more violent until it appears he might be going insane.The characters in this film may look a little rough at first but as we get to know them and the city they inhabit that seems to suit them.
The characters are very likable (especially the younger brother, White) The animation style is unusual but it has a certain "je ne sais quoi" =DAll in all this is a very attractive movie and a Moving one too, every time i see it i really feel emotion and at one part (you will see when you see it)it actually makes me well up with tears.I highly recommend this to everyone over the age of 12 (but i suggest parents to watch it before letting your children watch it XD).
On the other hand, maybe thats just me.Still, to finally come to an end, I can only recommend this movie to anyone interested in something you don't see every day.
Be it animation, story or movie-watching in general.