Exploring the Dreamscapes of Tekkonkinkreet

Written by Steven Collier

Tekkonkinkreet (Arias, 2006) is one of those movies that never quite got the attention it deserved. Right from the beginning, Tekkonkinkreet suffered enormously by being released less than a month after the critically acclaimed animated movie Paprika (Kon, 2006).  Born under the shadow of such a juggernaut, it remained overlooked despite its overwhelmingly positive reception. Tekkonkinkreet could do little but languish throughout the 2006 award season, an utter travesty.

By all rights, Tekkonkinkreet was just as revolutionary a movie as Paprika. Both were adaptations of previously printed stories. Both were mature animated films which more than earned their R ratings. And perhaps most importantly, both dealt with plots wherein the characters would shift between conventional reality and dreamscapes. Paprika, which is supposed to be set in a world mostly identical to our own, accomplished this through the tried and true method of introducing surreal imagery whenever there was any such transition. This juxtaposition between the familiar and the surreal served as an easily recognized visual cue for what was part of its characters’ dreams. However, Tekkonkinkreet utilized a markedly more novel method to achieve the same results.

Unlike Paprika, there is no “normal world” within Tekkonkinkreet’s universe. The entire film is set inside an insane caricature of Japanese urban centers called Takaramachi, or "Treasure Town." The ridiculously colorful metropolis is a hodge-podge of rusting water towers, neon bill-boards, crumbling brick and mortar stores, and gleaming skyskrapers, all smashed together on every city block. It evokes a child’s fanciful perception of the dualistic and constantly overwhelming nature of city life. Its plot is equally absurd: a frenetic fable involving aliens, super-human assassins, and a Yakuza scheme to demolish their own territory so they can rebuild it as an amusement park. Tekkonkinkreet ‘s narrative mimics its visual styling by presenting a child’s perception of  concepts that are too big for their understanding. This is perfect for a film which features a pair of orphaned street kids as its protagonists and narrators. However, it presents a serious hurdle for any director who wants to seriously convey dreamscapes in a world that has already gone mad.

There is precious little for an audience to find familiar within the universe of Tekkonkinkreet. Simply introducing surreal dream imagery would be nearly indistinguishable from the movie’s already established weird aesthetic. Fortunately, the animation team at STUDIO4°C was more than up to the challenge, and their solution was nothing short of brilliant. Instead of trying to further mutate the world of their movie, they opted to try and animate actual dreams, in all of their abstracted glory.

You see, while Tekkonkinkreet exists within a cartoonish reflection of urban Japan, it’s still a world with consistent physical laws. Gravity still exists. Spaces maintain fixed dimensions. Colors remain static. In short, while the environs and denizens of Treasure Town may appear alien to the viewer, they are all governed by a universal rules.

That all melts away, whenever we enter a character’s dreamscape. The world dissolves into an impressionist abstraction of itself. Backgrounds diffuse into hypnagogic panoramas, while Euclidean geometry ceases to have any bearing whatsoever. Color, shape, dimension, and movement all blur into a single, ponderous, polymorhphous panoply, and it is absolutely mindbending. Watching it all unfold can be genuinely disorienting.

Tekkonkinkreet’s dream sequences present scenes that are only possible in a medium as flexible as animation. No other form of cinema can alter its dimensional properties on a frame by frame basis. Tekkonkinkreet takes full advantage of that, and shows you gibbering, pandemonium vistas, as well as spellbinding flip-book worlds of unbridled imagination in a tour de force of images we usually only behold while under the merciful sedative of unconsciousness. They are visions of impossible realities, universes come unglued. When the audience is eventually yanked back into the usual two-dimensional world of its characters, the sudden return to any semblance of uniform movement actually triggers a sort of mental whiplash. The human mind simply isn’t used processing worlds where nothing is static.

Tekkonkinkreet set out to accomplish the impossible: recreate the actual subconscious experience of dreaming, and somehow transfer it, big as life, onto a 40 foot screen, in breath-taking cinemascope, and stereophonic sound. And in my opinion, it more than succeeded. Whereas most cinema, animated or otherwise, is content to flash a few surreal images and call it “dream-like,” only Tekkonkinkreet fully submerges its audience in a world utterly divorced from our own. And as alien as that experience may be, I feel that it is what ultimately gives this movie a universal appeal. We’ve all experienced Tekkonkinkreet in one form or another. However, up until now we’ve never been awake enough to fully enjoy it.