Myth and Religion in Michael Arias’ Tekkonkinkreet
by Jesse Atley
In an early action sequence of Tekkonkinkreet (2006, dir: Michael Arais) wide lens shots
follow White (Shiro) as he attempts to escape two violent (though incompetent) gang
members, making impossible leaps across Treasure Town, a retro-futuristic, dystopic
metropolis. White lands on the roof of a Buddhist temple, rendered in bright colours but,
like the rest of the city, clearly succumbing to decay. Trapped, he waits for the stroke of the
clock. Miraculously, Black (Kuro) – his older, wiser and more aggressive counterpart –
emerges, atop a giant statue of the blue elephant god, Ganesha. Ganesha, or Kangiten (as he
is more commonly referred to in Japan), is the god of beginnings – but also the remover of
obstacles, harbinger of good luck and fortune: the film opens, then, with Black’s association
with luck and fortune, as he rescues the innocent, immature White.
Scene from Tekkonkinkreet (2006)
The statue’s emergence also signals some of the major religious and spiritual themes of the film: chaos and calm, the coexistence of the spiritual and the profane, tradition and modernity. The city, even as dilapidated and plagued by violence as it is, is full of these idols: vestiges of reflection and meditation amid the chaos. Reminders of Kangiten echo, quite literally, through the soundscape of the city, as a recurring elephant’s call which marks the passage of time and infuses the narrative with a deeper, spiritual sense; a call back to the film’s exploration of fate, meaning, and destiny.
Watching Tekkonkinkreet for the first time is striking – not only for its visually arresting style, but also for the sheer density of moral and spiritual commentary and, above all, its forceful and unwavering belief in the redemptive power of love. Tekkonkinkreet was the first Japanese produced anime to be directed by a non-Japanese person and it draws its themes into contact with a wide-ranging series of inter-texts. When Arias first encountered the manga Tekkonkinkreet, written by Taiyo Matsumoto, he was a self-confessed “complete manga neophyte”; his adaptation, therefore, combines influences stretching beyond the manga world, drawing from humanist works like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Sci-fi epics and fantasy-drama films such as Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den.
The anime also pulls from various religions and mythologies: references to Buddhist philosophy, Shintoism, Christianity, and Greek mythology are woven throughout, manifesting sometimes as a rare sanctuary or moral touchpoint in the chaos, and other times in more sinister ways. Early in the film, White prays to God for forgiveness for Black’s violence, for example, fulfilling his role as Black’s conscience (“When he hurts people, I tell God we are sorry”). In demonstrating his spiritual connection, alongside his childish and immature nature, White seems to be as a similar figure to the archetypal Holy Fool. A figure deriving from Paul the Apostle’s writing (see KJV 1 Cor 4:10), the holy fool is an eccentric character who is in touch with greater truths about the world: unblinded by the wisdom of men, he is in tune with the wisdom of God. So too does White, in his ethereal, childish way, seem to have a greater sense of spiritual connection to God than the street-wise, earth-bound Black. White, who has planted an apple tree in outside the pair’s rusty car/home, is seen eating apples, which are (per Genesis) associated with the fall but also with greater divine wisdom.
Elsewhere, the gang leader Snake parallels the biblical Serpent, threatening to destroy Black and White’s (somewhat subverted) Eden and forcing them to question their own moral values: he claims to be serving some “God”, and attempts to both beguile and frustrate the vigilantes. His snake tattoo ties him to the Serpent and positions him as an enemy and potentially dangerous corrupting influence. His influence, like Satan’s over Eden, accelerates the disintegration – social, spiritual, physical, moral – of the city.
At the start, Tekkonkinkreet seems to be formed of these simple, Christian contrasts between good/evil, light/shadow, innocence/guilt. As it progresses, however, it becomes clear that it is a film characterised by a profound sense of in-betweenness. It is composed of undertones and impulses which do not settle into simple dialectic forms but instead form a matrix of connections which rejects its own simple initial binaries. This is exemplified by taijitu, the Taoist symbol of balance, representative of an indivisible whole, which appears as a recurrent symbol in the landscape and on the characters’ clothes.
Tekkonkinkreet culminates in a battle between Black and his own unconscious. Black, after White has been seemingly killed by a group of assassins hunting the pair, faces a refracted version of his own destructive and devastating impulses which manifest in the form of the mythological minotaur, who appears as a human-like figure, wearing a bull’s skull. Within Greek mythology, the minotaur is a monstrous figure of abandonment. Left to fend for itself within the confines of Daedalus’ Labyrinth, the minotaur’s story clearly mirror’s Black’s own experiences growing up as an orphan in the some times labyrinthian and always dangerous 1 Treasure Town. Half-beast, half-man, the minotaur reflects Black’s own duality and ties him to the other members of Treasure Town’s gangster class who are given bestial names (‘Rat' and ‘Snake’).
Arias drew inspiration from the work of painter Francis Bacon to render Black’s nightmarish vision of the Minotaur. Distorted, grotesque and confused, the minotaur manifests from Black’s dark unconscious. In a nightmarish, hallucinatory scene, as White fights for his life, the monstrous figure swells, distorting the bounds of Black’s self-identity and his moral limitations.
It is White’s love which draws Black back from his own internal darkness, ending in their escape, together, into the sun: a final message of hope which is undercut by its ambiguous reality. Matsumoto’s story – and Arias’ adaptation of it- has, at its heart, a great humanist message which emphasises, above all, fraternity and connection in a broken and disrupted world: even for a “manga neophyte” like Arias or myself, it retains a universalism which extends far beyond the narrative.
1 Tekkonkinkreet Director’s Notes, retrieved from https://hp.michaelarias.net/Ephemera/Writings/ 1 TekkonkinkreetDirectorsNotes/