TEKKONKINKREET, the award-winning 2006 feature based on the legendary Eisner Award-winning original manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, returned to theaters in an all-new 4K remaster in both its original Japanese language and English dub on May 31 and June 1. GKIDS will also release a 4K UHD Blu-Ray and digital download for the new 4K Remaster later this year. The film is the directorial debut of acclaimed filmmaker Michael Arias and went on to win the 2008 Japan Academy Film Prize for Animation of the Year. The cult-classic title also received the Ofuji Noburo Award (Best Film) at the 2006 Mainichi Film Awards, Best Original Story and Best Art Direction at the 2008 Tokyo Anime Awards, Golden Prize for Best Animated / Stop Motion Film at the 2007 Fantasia Festival, and more.
The innovative film follows Black, a boy who seeks to bend the city to his will through strength, and White, his innocent counterpart, two orphaned street kids living in the slums of Treasure Town. When real estate developers threaten to transform Treasure Town into a massive theme park, its very existence is put at risk. Determined to protect both White and their city, Black takes on the yakuza and assassins, gradually losing his innocence as he confronts a dark manifestation within himself.
Alongside the collaboration between GKIDS and Japanese animation house STUDIO4°C in releasing the film in the United States, we had the opportunity to speak with Michael Arias, director of TEKKONKINKREET, and Anthony Weintraub, screenwriter of the film. We talked about initial exposure to the source material and some of the many details that make TEKKONKINKREET a strong entry into the world of anime films, both then and now.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: The first question I have for both of you, can you talk about how you originally came to work on TEKKONKINKREET or came into contact with the project?
Michael Arias: Yeah, I’ll start. I, in ’96, actually 30 years ago, my roommate in Tokyo gave me a copy of it. This was a hardcore manga fan, and he had a wall of comic books. And I had a “Where do I start?” kind of question and asked him for a recommendation. And it was new in book form. He gave me the three volumes and just said, it’s going to make you cry. And that was it. I mean, I was hooked and spent the next 10 years carrying my copy everywhere. And it started out kind of as a joke. Because I’m working in animation, people would ask me, “What are you working on now?” Or, “What are you going to do next?” And my go-to answer was just, “Oh, I’m going to make a movie of TEKKONKINKREET.” And it started to kind of take form. I made some demos, I got Anthony involved. And it kind of started gathering momentum from there. But there were , I don’t know, five years where it was kind of a joke. People would say, “Hey, how you doing?” I’d be like, “Oh, I’m making TEKKONKINKREET.” And so that’s kind of how the thing started for me. And it took me several years to put all the pieces together. It wasn’t at all like a straight line. So, yeah, that’s how it was for me.
Anthony Weintraub: My answer is a simple one, which is that Mike, I just got so sick of hearing him talk about this thing he was making. No, just kidding. He brought me into the project. We had actually had a long standing friendship. And then were always talking about working together. And Mike brought me into another project that he was involved with, The Animatrix. And then he had this property. And he basically just asked how I would respond to it. I mean, without coming out and saying “Would you work on it?” And of course, it blew me away. So we had a shorthand together already. And basically agreed that it was all about holding on to the emotional core of the piece while navigating some pretty interesting, challenging tonal shifts between that tenderness that the manga has and it’s kind of brutality. So developing it together was really just an exciting, exciting time to have someone like that who really knew what he wanted to do and how to go about doing it.
Q: That makes sense. And Michael, speaking to your directorial work for TEKKONKINKREET, that was some of the earliest non-Japanese directorial work on an anime film at all. Both at that time and now, how did it feel to make a name for yourself in Tokyo and encounter this opportunity?
Michael Arias: Well, I’ve lived here so long at this point that, even in those days, I wasn’t — that was something that was kind of imposed on me. People would say “Isn’t it difficult to be a foreigner doing this stuff?” But my whole life I was immersed in the Japanese film industry and animation here. If you think about it as a handicap, it’s just going to slow you down. I mean, that’s really how I feel. Even now, I can’t spend my time thinking well, the locals that I work with have it easier because they’re not from out of town or they speak the language better. Whatever it is. If you think of those things as deficits, then you’re really in trouble. I felt like being a foreigner is also, in a way, kind of a secret superpower, because it does give me a different perspective on things. I can draw on different things that makes it feel like something different from what people expect. I’m just talking about when it comes to my filmmaking, that’s like a secret sauce that I have that I can deploy. And, yeah, it is weird to think that I’m some kind of a pioneer, because that wasn’t on my mind at all. It’s nice to be the first guy to do something, but in the moment all I was thinking was “Let’s make it, let’s make it, let’s make it.”
Q: Anthony, speaking toward the screenplay, can you talk about any interactions you had with Taiyo Matsumoto, and what those interactions contributed to your approach to the writing?
Anthony Weintraub: Oh, definitely. I can just start out by saying that as extraordinary an opportunity as it is to work on material like this, I mean, you have to just dig it. You just have to be passionate about it and want to see it up on the screen. Because we were lucky that we get to work in this business and make great content. But these things take a lot of time and resources. I don’t get involved with things that I’m not that obsessive about. And so I always want to go meet the people if I’m adapting something, which I’ve done a bunch in the past. The people who generate the content in its original form. I think some people would either just say they want to keep the original creators at arm’s length, that they want to go do their own thing. And there’s definitely an aspect of adaptation where that’s crucial, where you have to just say goodbye to some extent to the original material and make your thing. But I always want to embrace it and go talk to and meet the people who wrote it in its original form. So meeting Taiyo was just an incredible honor to me. And then becoming what I would consider a friend was just an amazing result. We spent quite a bit of time, as much as I possibly could. Talking to him, I did two extensive interviews with him. What inspired him to write it, getting fairly deep into the inner workings of the relationship between these two characters, his background, and then also talking about, of course, some of them might be considered more external things like his relationship to the city, and why he portrayed the city in the way he did. So there was quite a bit of interaction between us. And that was really, really important.
Q: Thank you for that. And Michael, CG animation techniques are a large part of both your career and plenty of the animation in TEKKONKINKREET. What was your thinking when deciding what needed to be animated with which techniques? And to what extent did the design choices of staff like production designer Shinji Kimura influence any animation decisions?
Michael Arias: That’s a good question. Because I kind of grew up doing visual effects the old fashioned way. And then later, computer graphics and computer animation. That’s just kind of the thing that’s in my toolkit. So whether it’s animation, or, or live action, or some kind of hybrid, that’s where I go to when I’m in trouble. I kind of revert to the visual effects guy. So, you know, I had this idea for TEKKONKINKREET. And this is something that I also talked to Anthony about a lot. I wanted it to feel as dynamic as possible. There was a Brazilian movie called City of God that was a huge, real touchstone for me. And I was already well into trying to put TEKKON together. But I saw that movie — it’s about these Brazilian street kids in a slum. And their evolution at the same time as this favela, this slum that they’re in is evolving. That really spoke to me and felt like it was one of a few different entry points for a cinematic adaptation of TEKKONKINKREET. But that kind of thing, this moving camera or a handheld camera, crane shots, very fluid camera work is really difficult to pull off in traditional animation, in hand-drawn animation, which was the basic technique we were using. Not impossible, but very difficult.
And up to that point there were a few movies that had sequences like that. There’s this great scene in Kiki’s Delivery Service where you’re kind of following over the coastline and seeing stuff whiz by. But to make that one thing, there’s just a lot of blood, sweat and tears that go into that. But at the time, at the studio that I was working at, one of my mentors there, a guy named Koji Morimoto, is really, I think, an unsung talent in animation. He was one of the animation supervisors of Akira, did a lot of stuff. Well, anyways, he was kind of one of the pioneers of using computer animation to kind of break that barrier, just an integration, a very tight integration between background artworks and character animation and the staging of shots. He really kind of showed us the way with stuff he did on a short film that he did called Noiseman Sound Insect. And then also on his chapter of The Animatrix, which I produced.
And so I was kind of seeing the work that had been done up to that point and thinking, “Well, how can I use the technology to actually enable not just this kind of staging, but also this kind of directing? How can I make it look like you’re standing on the street corner, you’ve got a cell phone and you’re just watching these kids run across the street and jump into traffic, and you’re running down the street with them now and now you’re flying above the street?” This was for us anyways, it was all very new. And so figuring out how to use the technology, how to kind of deploy it and also to mix it up so that it wouldn’t just be like, okay, here’s another one of those shots. They’re going back to the same technique. We really made an effort to try something different in every shot. So sometimes just the handheld stuff is kind of done in the post-production. Some of it is done actually in the animation. Some of it is done in the computer graphics. We have hand-drawn characters actually kind of sitting in the 3D space. There’s all this different stuff going on.
And that was us, part of it was us experimenting, like, “Oh, if that works, can we do this?” Part of it was us trying to keep the audience on the edge of their seat. So that’s kind of a roundabout way of answering the question, but that was all part of making TEKKON. I still feel like because we were using hand animation, traditional animation techniques, that when you look at a frame of TEKKON, it looks hand-drawn, hand-painted. But because we had a genius art director in Shinji Kimura and an amazing CG team that I was getting my hands very dirty with. And also an environment where we were kind of encouraged to, well, I wouldn’t say we were encouraged to try different stuff, but that the people that were making TEKKON all wanted to try something different. And there’s nothing like someone telling you, “Oh, you can’t do that” to really get your juices flowing.
Q: For this remastered version, are there any kinds of changes we can look forward to beyond just an upgrade to the visuals?
Michael Arias: Just going back to the original source, TEKKON, I’ll be completely honest, it never looked as great as we wanted to on film. And that’s just because we were in a rush to finish it and didn’t have the time, the budget, or the experience, maybe, to get a good film transfer. And it was kind of not the finest technology. So this is the movie that we were seeing when we saw it in the studio, in our dailies. This is, we’ve gone back to that, basically. So the disappointment that I felt seeing TEKKON on film, now that’s been — I had always hoped that we’d be able to somehow do a real, proper digital remastering. Now that even the smallest cineplex in a little town has laser projection and high resolution exhibitions. So for me, it’s just really great to bring it up to that standard. Nothing new, really, it just looks a lot better. It’s like we got out there and wiped off all the grime.
We’d like to thank Michael Arias and Anthony Weintraub for taking the time to speak with us about TEKKONKINKREET. You can check out the link here and check to see if you can see this magnificent film tonight. Or, keep an eye out for the 4K UHD Blu-Ray and digital download for the new 4K Remaster later this year from GKIDS.
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