Tekkokinkreet.

"A clutter-bomb vision of a colorfully decaying pan-Asian metropolis that spurs a few of its fiercest defenders into violent battle, Tekkonkinkreet is a Japanese anime feature that for all its stylistic bravado is sharply attuned to a modern world afraid of change," writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

"At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about the apocalyptic, futuristic yarn being told here, in which a couple of street orphans with unexplained superpowers must battle a variety of evildoers trying to take over their neighborhood," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, but "by the end of this phantasmagorical journey, I was as wrapped up in the precarious fate of these two wounded kids and the honorable yakuza warlords of Treasure Town as I've been in any film all year."

"Beautiful and a touch bewildering, Tekkonkinkreet kinks up a fairly familiar story of love and loyalty with a helping of underworld crime action, the usual juvenile agonies and some fuzzy philosophy," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The first-time feature director Michael Arias, an American who lives and works in Japan, stuffs a lot of exposition and action into 100 eminently watchable if baggy minutes. But the laudably ambitious screenplay attributed to Anthony Weintraub tends to distract as much as it engages."

"You would never find anything like it in American animation," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE, and that's "too bad, because films such as this (coming on the heels of another fantastical Japanese mindfuck, Paprika) make you realize how much more the form can encompass when its malleable properties are exercised."

Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, finds the film "distracts from its overstuffed plot with a handful of engaging visual set pieces, demonstrating an intriguing willingness to thrill in abstraction."

"[D]on't call it anime," advises John Constantine at Nerve. "Tekkonkinkreet looks more like the bastard child of Cordell Barker and Moebius than Osamu Tezuka. Its characters are exaggerated and rounded and the architecture is halfway between Hong Kong and Bollywood. It's a unique spectacle" and "has more imagination and beauty in five minutes than almost every other animated film released in 2007 combined."

Posted by dwhudson at July 13, 2007 5:45 AM