Tokyo — "WHEN I was a beat cop this town had warmth to it; now it's stone cold," sighs Fujimura, a world-weary policeman in the animated Japanese film "Tekkon Kinkreet," dispensing the lament of those who have lived their lives in one place and resent the intrusion of change upon their utopia of familiar sights and streets.
But there still seems to be a lot of life left in Treasure Town, the phantasm of an Asian city brought to the screen by American director Michael Arias. Here, mechanical Buddhas with elephant heads join gangs, and lost boys battle for turf, while greedy developers from another planet work with the local mob to plow old neighborhoods under. But it is the city itself -- with its 24/7 glow, its temples and tuk-tuks and color-splashed skyscrapers with grotesque animal-head motifs -- that is the star of this critically acclaimed anime.
"We wanted to make the city the central character of the film," says Arias, an L.A. native who has spent 15 of his 39 years in Tokyo. He sculpted his images from the Tokyo neighborhoods he knows and loves but also borrowed from cityscapes in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Colombo, Sri Lanka, to give his metropolis a pan-Asian feel. He likens the clutter to "a big box of toys you just drop on the carpet."
"The chaos is very Asian: old stuff, new stuff, these amoeba-like cities that are constantly consuming themselves," Arias says of the setting to his directorial debut. "It's a parallel universe that is kind of like Japan. But it's not Japan." A bit like Arias himself, who speaks fluent Japanese and knows the culture well but has become a bit of a novelty here as the first non-Japanese director green-lighted for a major anime feature.
Arias began his career doing special-effects camerawork in Hollywood on films like James Cameron's "The Abyss" before moving into computer graphics and software development. In the mid-'90s, he developed a shading software program that gives computer animation the look of traditional cel drawings, first used on Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" and now a staple of the Japanese director's films.
And he took on the producer's role in "The Animatrix," working with the Wachowski brothers on a collection of nine animated shorts inspired by "The Matrix."
But "Tekkon Kinkreet" was the project he nurtured for more than a decade, a story originally told in a revered manga series from the mid-1990s by Taiyo Matsumoto. Arias finally agreed to direct it himself when it became clear that, as much as the anime community loved the manga, no one could match his obsession for turning it into a film.
