If the title Tekkonkinkreet suggests a mashup of different sounds, it’s not without reason: Part sibling drama like Grave of the Fireflies, part gangster story like Great Teacher Onizuka, and part battle between good and evil like Neon Genesis Evangelion, the movie is a collection of disparate anime parts that never really comes together.
Maybe it’s because the script was adapted from a manga series, or because first-time director Michael Arias wants to say everything in one film, but Tekkonkinkreet feels too outsized for its own good. Black (Ninomiya Kazunari) and White (Aoi Yū), two orphaned brothers living on the streets, are yin and yang personified: Black dispenses enemies with his aggressive street smarts, sheltering the blithe White from a town rundown with corruption and despair.
Watching the two vault their way through their surroundings looking for scraps offers an enthralling window into the unbound hope of youth; Arias’s camerawork is spirited, while the atmosphere is appropriately decayed. But by film’s end there is no escaping Arias’s proclivity for heavy-handed philosophizing. Crows and doves siege the frame en masse, and Black engages in a conversation with the Little Devil Inside for what feels like an eternity.
With My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki Hayao proved that less is more, but whatever the genre, most major anime directors seem hellbent on spectacle. An otherwise delicate examination of childhood run amok, Tekkonkinkreet is undermined by its desire to go big.
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