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ODD CHILD IN THE CITY: Tekkonkinkreet
by MARK SLUTSKY
North America’s next big crossover Japanese animated hit might just come from the hands of... an American. Tekkonkinkreet, based on a manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, is a Japanese production, produced by the country’s Studio 4°C, but its director, Michael Arias, is a U.S.-born industry vet who’s been living and working in Japan for the last decade-and-a-half.
After working in the American film industry, as part of special effects crews for movies like The Abyss and Total Recall, Arias moved to Japan to work for an effects house there. He eventually began working in computer animation, consulting for Montreal’s Softimage, and designing software that would eventually be used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli in the making of films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Later, he would become the producer of the Wachowski brothers’ successful Animatrix series, but Arias wasn’t on the way to becoming a director himself until fate intervened and he began the long path to making Tekkonkinkreet.
“In ’95—it was right after the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas attack in the subways—a friend of mine suggested I read the Tekkon manga comic,” the thoughtful, soft-spoken Arias tells the Mirror. “I was staying with a friend who had an enormous collection. I had read some manga but not an enormous amount, and I didn’t consider myself a manga fan. But my friend had a really nice collection and I was working at home with a lot of time on my hands, so I asked him to recommend me something. He gave me a copy of Tekkon, as it had just come out as a book, and I kind of just fell in love with it.”
Extraterrestrial gentrification
Both the manga and the movie feature a pair of child protagonists, Black and White, friends of opposite temperaments (Black is more sinister, while White is an innocent), who live on the streets of the fictional city Takara Machi (“Treasure City”). Something strange is afoot in this already odd town, and they find themselves confronting a form of extraterrestrial gentrification.
“On the surface, it seems like this kind of fantastical idea, these kids trying to save this old decaying town that they’ve grown up in from these alien real estate developers, who are trying to turn the city into a sort of Disneyland,” Arias says. “It seems like a really strange idea, but you compare it to what I was experiencing living in Tokyo at the time—the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult were using this weird electronic headgear to encourage telepathy between their members and the cult leader, and they had this grand scheme to take over Japan and turn it into an island of their religious cult. They had invented a machine to create earthquakes, and they were spreading poison gas in the subway! It almost seemed like science fiction.
“So, watching that, combined with the fact that the neighbourhood I was living in was undergoing an urban renewal, and I was seeing a lot of beautiful old buildings get knocked down and very modern shopping malls put up in their place. And also because I was in my friend’s apartment, on the seventh floor, and so my vantage point was very similar to the two boys in Tekkon, kind of sitting on the telephone poles and looking down on the street—I was able to identify with the story in a really concrete way.”
Bridging the gap
Arias began working on the story as an entirely computer-animated pilot with director Koji Morimoto, but somewhere down the line Morimoto dropped out and Arias became the helmsman almost by default. But that, of course, has given him the opportunity to put his own stamp on the film: “One thing I don’t like about a lot of animated films is the sense of distance between the audience and the picture onscreen,” he says. “Like you’re watching a painting on a distant wall. I really wanted to make you feel as though you’re in that city, standing on a street corner, and you see these kids running through the alleys. To make it feel like a really immediate experience. That’s quite difficult to do in animation—partially because of the technology, it’s much less challenging to do a static composition.” It also allowed him to put one of his favourite bands on the soundtrack, Warp electronic duo Plaid: “They have that sort of melancholy but playful sound that I really associated with the story.”
But what seems the most important to him are the story’s fascinating ambiguities. “Rather than answering questions and wrapping things up, it’s actually asking you questions: What’s worth fighting for? What do you live for? What’s important to you? And I kind of thought your answer to that would completely depend on your internal state when you see the movie. I could reread the manga 10 times and each time come up with a different theory as to what it’s about. It’s interesting in that way, it actually reflects you—it’s not just a statement, it actually interacts with the viewers.”
TekkonKinkreet screens as Fantasia’s
opening night film, with host Michael
Arias, at the Hall Theatre, July 5, 7 p.m.
Assmonsters, gangsters
and demon slayers
>> And other strange, ridiculous and
ultra- twisted flicks playing in Fantasia’s first week
CAMCORDER CRAZINESS: Offscreen
by MALCOLM FRASER,
MATTHEW HAYS,
JEFFREY MALECKI
and MARK SLUTSKY
Viva
Wow, this is a weird one. But hey, this is Fantasia, after all. Anna Biller writes, directs and stars in this entirely unusual and somehow endearing film about a housewife in L.A., 1972, riding the wave of sexual liberation yet somehow still remarkably unsatisfied. Biller has clearly seen the Radley Metzger collection, soaking herself in the aesthetic of a cheeseball early ’70s soft-porn film. It’s a strange exercise in camp: Biller plays Viva as she searches for her new identity in a brave and crazy new sexual world. But is it a better one? Set and costume designers will swoon over the deeply affected art direction, but there are times when Viva feels like a one-décor joke. I got off just as much on the plastic performances of the universally-superb cast. (MH)
Assmonster: The Making of a Horror Movie
This movie is ridiculous. Director “Bill Zebub” plays, presumably, himself, a dude who decides he can make some cash by slapping together a cheapo horror flick and selling it for $30 a pop to metalheads. Of course, things don’t go smoothly, and anyone familiar with the vagaries of no-budget filmmaking will sympathize with the many mishaps his motley bunch of buddies endure in the name of trash. Now... this movie has a lot of caveats. The acting is terrible (the camerawork is actually okay though). The pacing is preposterous and awkward. The nudity is beyond gratuitous. And yet, it definitely has its own kind of heart, and a definite intelligence behind it as well. (MS)
SOFT-CORE SET DESIGN: Viva Aachi and Ssipak
This ultra-twisted Korean cartoon takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where human excrement is the sole source of energy, and the masses are forced to consume laxative treats called juicybars. The bars are also coveted by a band of marauding mutants called the Diaper Gang, and by the titular duo, a pair of bumbling street hustlers. First-time director Jo Beom-jin throws all notions of political correctness out the window with the highly scatological and ultra-violent content, so it’s not for the squeamish, but the crack animation, dream-logic plotting and nasty humour make it a worthwhile outing for extreme animation fans. (MF)
The Restless
Korean director Jo Dong-oh’s film is the tale of Yi Gwak, a demon slayer who travels between the realms of the living and the dead, hunted by the semi-divine reincarnations of his former friends, foes and lovers. He must protect the doe-eyed So-Hwa, the keeper of a powerful amulet. All of the classic fantasy elements are there, and both The Lord of the Rings and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are recalled in its supernatural fight scenes and sumptuous sets. Weighed down by a scattered narrative, the film never really reaches its potential, but it is a fine 90 minutes of escapism nonetheless. (JM)
Yellow Fellas
There’s something instantly admirable about a shoestring-budget feature made on the streets of Montreal about a group of Asian men desperately attempting to build a collective identity for themselves. CBC radio personality Tetsuro Shigematsu writes, directs and stars as the lead (and he also wrote his own rave review in the Fantasia program) in Yellow Fellas, where he plays a man who gets into a fight with some skinheads, only to learn that despite his Asian lineage, he can’t kick ass. Shigematsu clearly didn’t know quite how to end his film, but there are some very funny and inspired moments here, and Carl Amabili has a great turn as a wannabe Asian. (MH)
ASIAN IDENTITY CRISIS: Yellow Fellas The Banquet
Part of a lucrative recent trend in Chinese cinema, the latest from Feng Xiaogang is an epic period piece set in imperial times, featuring lavish production design, balletic battles and Shakespearean themes. The Emperor (Ge You), who took the throne in dastardly fashion by killing his own brother, proceeds to marry his widowed sister-in-law, Empress Wan (Zhang Ziyi), setting off a domino effect of scheming and betrayal in the court. The fight scenes are some of the most lyrical since Crouching Tiger, shot in rapturous slow motion and impeccably edited, but they’re fairly infrequent; for better or worse, this film is more high art than martial arts. (MF)
The Signal
Writer/directors David Bruckner and Dan Bush’s thriller takes a page from the J-horror wave, featuring a mysterious transmission that turns all, or most, who hear it into murderers. But that’s where similarities to films like The Ring end, as The Signal breaks down into an uneven, if inventive, three-part structure. The first part of the film, a straight survival-oriented “what if?” scenario, is quite involving, but when the film switches to the crazies’ perspective, it turns into awkward comedy and the movie’s momentum is lost, only to slide into a more abstract last act. (MS)
S&Man
As a big fan of author and academic Carol Clover (her book Men, Women and Chainsaws is essential reading for any horror movie buff), I was psyched to see S&Man, J.T. Petty’s feature-length documentary on the audience’s relationship to on-screen carnage. Petty starts things off right, showing us clips from one of the two seminal voyeurism=murder films, Peeping Tom (the other being Psycho). He then cuts between interviews with several gore-crazed directors, who attempt to explain the thrill at watching people on screen in severe peril, as well as solid analysis from Clover (who sports a Lisa Simpson hairdo). There are some truly fascinating moments in S&Man, but Petty’s quest for some understanding of the sub-genre ultimately feels largely unexplained. Perhaps that’s one of his points: that our relationship to onscreen violence is mysterious—and that’s part of its appeal. (MH)
Offscreen
An unnerving and richly self-referential portrait of a descent into madness captured on video. Nicolas Bro (played by himself) is an actor who decides to record an entire year in his life, gradually estranging his wife and friends, and engaging with his own pathologies via his ever-present hand-held camcorder. An extreme manifestation of the contemporary obsession with self-surveillance, the film convincingly explores the psychological gaps between self and other, and within the psyche itself. Set in grim and nocturnal northern Europe, and rendered in grainy, claustrophobic lo-fidelity, this is a highly compelling and unsettling film. (JM)
Time
Kim Ki-duk, who previously directed the art house hits 3-Iron and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring among others, brings us this disturbing drama about a wildly insecure woman who undergoes radical plastic surgery (played by Park Ji-Yeon before, Seong Hyeon-a after) and proceeds to conduct a rather advanced mindfuck experiment on her boyfriend (Ha Jung-woo). The film is uneven in spots and definitely sacrifices narrative logic in service of its themes, but it’s intelligent and thought-provoking, and Kim sprinkles the austere, circular storyline with jarring, undeniably heavy moments whose creepy imagery make an impression on the brain. (MF)
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