Although Tekkonkinkreet is his first feature film, Michael Arias is hardly a beginner when it comes to anime. Even the greatest master of the genre, Hayao Miyazaki, has made use of the young American's innovative methods for combining computer graphics with traditional, painstaking cel technique. (Can there be a better resume builder than Spirited Away?) So Arias's debut as a director, which he's been incubating for nearly a decade, has been eagerly anticipated--especially after he took a break to oversee the vivid, sometimes stomach-churning Animatrix for the Wachowski brothers in 2003.


His inspiration for Tekkonkinkreet (the title plays on the Japanese words for "concrete," "iron," and "muscle") came from Taiyo Matsumoto's manga of the same name. It seems doubtful that the basic story could have exerted such a tug: it's about two street urchins, Black and White, whose ironclad loyalty is pitted against a coalition of thugs, yakuzas, and extraterrestrial killing machines. There are, to be fair, gradations of wickedness. The crooks are arranged in a complex food chain, nearly benign at the bottom and monstrous at the top. But in the end, this is one more smackdown between good and evil, in which the hero is tempted by absolute power and just barely escapes with his ethics intact. (Think Star Wars, if Luke Skywalker happened to be waist high and constantly picked his nose on camera.)

No, what must have grabbed Arias was the intricate landscape of Treasure Town, where the story is set. The characters are essentially cutouts. The background, however, is rendered in 3-D, and the level of detail lavished on what Black calls "this armpit of a city" is a marvel to behold. The mélange of new construction and crumbling hovels, billboards and ornamental pinnacles, draws on postwar Tokyo's urban panorama. (For particulars of Tokyo's demimonde, Arias is said to have studied the work of such photographers as Daido Moriyama and Katsumi Watanabe.) But this is also an archetypal city, whose constant dilapidation can be both depressing and oddly comforting. Arias brings the place to life: it's irresistible. He also fills it with deftly symbolic landmarks, including a massive advertisement for safety matches that encapsulates the film's entire struggle between light and darkness.

It's the soul of Treasure Town that seems mostly deeply at risk. An enterprising yakuza, Rat, wants to gut the colorful neighborhoods and erect a hideous theme park in their stead. (Take that, Walt Disney!) Yet his underling, Kimura, can't countenance the disappearance of his beloved mean streets. In one telling scene, he visits an old strip joint, down at the heels and half deserted. Here, he suggests, is the repository of old-fashioned values: the bumping and grinding strippers are the survivors of a quaint, non-corporate culture that Rat (and his even more stylized superior, Snake) are determined to bury forever. At this juncture, the film's primary battle between good and evil feels contrived. It's easy, after all, to assert the innocence of Black and White--as children, they get a free pass. But the innocence of a pole-dancing joint? That's a taller order, and I have to admire Arias for pulling it off.