A New York Necessity
Tekkon Kinkreet , the first Japanese feature film to be directed by an American, let alone the first anime to do so, has its US premiere tonight at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The film will be screened at MoMA for five days straight . I first heard about Tekkon during my initial research for Japanamerica , when my dear friend, New York filmmaker Stephen Earnhart, urged me to contact Tekkon director Michael Arias. The resulting interviews and studio tours with Michael and veteran producer and studio founder Eiko Tanaka gave me the blueprint for the rest of the book, and I remain deeply grateful to them and to Stephen for the gift. The film currently in production (and at a maddening pace) was Tekkon. Michael showed me some "dailies"--scenes that were more or less polished, but still disjointed--and I was sufficiently impressed. But as in any narrative medium, a few good scenes in anime do not a good story make. When I first sat down to watch Tekkon in a Tokyo