Essay by Tekkonkinkreet screenwriter Anthony Weintraub Michael Arias and I have been friends since college, and we’ve worked together on and off ever since. He would do some sound for a theater production of mine, or some music for one of my short films, for example, and I would consult with him on whatever he was doing. We developed a synchronicity as friends, as artistic collaborators, and as unabashed movie geeks. We shared the same passions and liked a lot of the same movies, and if we disagreed there would always be a debate late into the night. After Mike moved to Japan and become involved with The Animatrix, he asked me if I’d be a kind of middleman between the Wachowskis and the Japanese anime directors who would be developing the brothers’ thumbnail ideas into short films. I became a sort of story consultant or editor on the project, and ended up writing a lot of the dialogue.   Mike had spent a number of years trying to get Tekkonkinkreet made. He had even set up shop and developed a 3D test short with anime veteran Koji Morimoto as director. I kept encouraging him to commission a screenplay, and he finally gave in and asked me to write it. We were both convinced this would help the process, and at that point we had talked enough about the piece to know that neither of us was going to let the other one down when it came to treating the material with care—and making a kickass movie. I first read the original manga in French (there was no English translation available). What little French I retained from High School AP got me through enough of it, and I was simply blown away. The process Mike had always intended—making the film in Japan at a Japanese production house for a Japanese release—was akin to reverse engineering. Conventionally, when it comes to making an anime based on a manga, the American film industry’s concept of development is almost nonexistent. The art is worked on over a long period of time—character design, sequence key frames—and then the screenplay is cobbled together. With Tekkonkinkreet, we were going to attempt a much more Western approach: develop the screenplay first and go from there. I knew I had to be involved in the making of Tekkonkinkreet. First, there was Taiyo Matsumoto’s art—so expressive, so engaging, and so beautifully designed. Taiyo is a master storyteller, and it’s pretty obvious when you read any of his works that he is a learned student of his craft——not only of manga, but comics worldwide. His approach is somewhere between Batman and French master Moebius. Taiyo uses the frame in a variety of ways, and his time signatures are almost expressionistic. And the story of Tekkonkinkreet was unlike anything I had seen, certainly in commercial manga, but even in American comics. It was more akin to the alternative graphic novel genre. And then there is Taiyo’s humor, his gentleness and poetry.   There was something about the two main characters, Black and White, that felt utterly real. They were distant from the world that was caving in around them, but still so passionate about it. And they are thrust into a terrible situation—as two little kids!  I sympathized with their plight, and I was also amazed at how their story develops. It made sense to me as a movie, and yet I knew it was going to be an enormous challenge taking a story developed over three manga volumes and telling it in a single, two-hour feature length film. This is a powerfully human story set in a futuristic, impersonal environment. Taiyo’s true achievement is finding the poetry in the interplay between both.   But the time structure would have to be totally different, as would the narrative arc and the character dynamics. Mike wanted to retain as much of the manga as possible, so I had my work cut out for me. In the manga, Taiyo spends a lot of time developing the slow pace of life in the city. The manga is very much a piece about the observed life of a place, and how it changes (or doesn’t change) over time. The ‘A’ plot—the development of the Kiddie Kastle amusement park—almost exists in the background. So my first decision was to foreground this action and have everything follow from that. My approach wasn’t much different from how I would adapt a novel. The fact that I was dealing with pictures helped and hindered me in many ways, but I look at everything as story and proceed from there. Taiyo had once told me that as he started the third volume he was well on his way to writing five volumes (or maybe it was seven or eight), but then he got a call from his publisher saying that they needed him to finish, and finish right away. So the third act feels a bit pinched. Aside from that, Tekkonkinkreet was just as challenging as any adaptation. I had to distill the story into cinematic form, create characters and dialogue that fit the style and tone Mike and I were seeking, and at the same time preserve what we felt was such a dynamic piece of original art. I worked a lot on exploring the dualities inherent in the story: Black and White, Fujimura and Sawada, Suzuki and Kimura, Snake and Kimura. The characters riff off one another and the story’s central themes. We wanted to track all of them so that their journeys through the story made sense, and they developed fully as individual characters.   Adapting material to the screen has its own set of challenges, and I would never take on the enterprise if I weren’t inspired by the original material. So built into that is the desire to remain true to the material. But a book, even in illustrated, comic form, is not a film. Because we made a conscious choice to maintain (almost) all of the storylines and the overall arc of the manga, I would say the hardest part of writing the script was to simultaneously expand and condense. Creating the architecture of the plot was the ultimate challenge. One way I did this was to simplify the narrative arcs of the characters while building more tension throughout the story. For example, in the conclusion of the film, there are several elements at work, all of which had to be mixed together to create a logical and emotional climax— White’s dream sequences, which culminate in the final scene at the beach, the struggle between Black and White (who seem to communicate even though they are not in the same place), the destruction of the amusement park, and Black’s adventure with the Minotaur.   I did quite a bit of research, taking several trips to Japan, soaking up Mike’s Tokyo (and Hong Kong) and meeting with Taiyo. Taiyo was a dream. I vividly remember our first meeting—at a little Vietnamese place in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo. He was not as I expected—diminutive, incredibly shy, kind. Once we got to talking it was like being with an old friend. He was so generous, which I found amazing for a guy who was meeting the American screenwriter who was adapting his ‘baby.’  He was always generous from that minute on—sharing anecdotes about what inspired him to write Tekkonkinkreet. Our conversations ending up playing an important role in my adaptation.   Tekkonkinkreet is first and foremost an emotional story, a love story. It’s about preserving the innocence inside versus letting ourselves become bitter and angry. This story has a nice dose of Peter Pan in it, a ‘lost boys’ quality. The core narrative is about how important it is to keep an innocent heart, to stay uncorrupted, which is impossible, of course, but a great goal. And it’s really these messages that live on, that make it universal.    The main element of the story for me is simple: how two young boys get into trouble, and through their struggles figure out how important they are to one another. The film is about the importance of human connection, of choosing love over remaining alone on a path of destruction. This was the main theme which I tried to echo in all of the subplots and threads of the film. The film is an intimate story, about the war that exists within all of us, the battle between our base instincts and what we know is right. It’s also a distinctly male film—there are no major female characters in the film—and so in some ways it’s about the destructive, physical power of the ‘male’ side versus the softer, less overt female side. The physical is so strong, so seductive, so obvious. But in the end, it kills. It is greedy, and it offers nothing in return.    There are obviously sub-plots, one of the main ones being the constant march of progress, in this case urban development. Our cities are systematically torn apart, sometimes with little forethought or grace. This takes an emotional toll on the human psyche, and although it’s too simple to say ‘development is bad,’ it’s important to acknowledge the consequences these events have on human communities. In the manga, the motif repeated (mostly by the elderly Gramps) is that Black really exists to keep White alive. I suppose you can just substitute the word “hope” for White, and you get a good idea of what the story is about. The phrase “what’s left to save?’ might be another, more layered motif the story pursues, because White is damaged, perhaps beyond repair. One of my favorite scenes in the film is the chase that culminates in one of the alien assassins being lit on fire by White. I don’t love it for its violence, but for the contrast of the actual violence with White’s dream-like reverie. Just before dropping the match on the alien assassin, White says: “Agent White had a dream, of the sea...the sky...the trees...and the wind,” then he burns the assassin to death. To me, the scene embodies the conflict at the center of the story. Two opposing forces are crashing into each other, and spiraling out of control. White’s hopefulness and innocence, his belief in beauty, and his poetry, clash with the forces of violence—and we pray that the former will survive.  ___________________________________________________

Tekkonkinkreet ©2006 Taiyo Matsumoto/Shogakukan, Aniplex, Asmik Ace, Beyond C, dentsu, TOKYO MX. Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Inc. Anime Masterpieces 226 West 47th Street, Suite 900 New York, NY 10036 Phone: 212-398-7145 Fax: 212-398-7146 www.animemasterpieces.com ©2008 Gorgeous Entertainment