Above their heads, though, older men have their own gangs and their own plans. When an old yakuza named Rat returns to the area, the police get worried and the local criminal element stirs. But Rat turns out to be a softy compared to Snake, a creepy shirtless entrepreneur who seems to be half fox, half devil. Black's efforts to beat back the yakuza influence on "his" city are surprisingly successful, considering that he's just one boy carrying a length of pipe as a weapon, but Snake is an ambitious, dangerous adversary with apparently supernatural assassins on his side. Things get so dangerous that White and Black have to separate, which goes poorly for both of them. And then things just plain get weird.

Tekkon Kinkreet is the directorial debut of American-born special-effects artist (and Animatrix producer) Michael Arias, who has lived in Japan since the early '90s. A computer-graphics pioneer who developed software used on Princess Mononoke to make CG animation look like cel work, he brings a lot of innovative techniques and imagery to anime, but also a very unusual sensibility. It's matched by a deeply strange, heavily symbolic story, based on Taiyo Matsumoto's manga. Sometimes the influences are relatively clear—early on, Black and White feel a lot like Hayao Miyazaki protagonists, like the stars of My Neighbor Totoro or Grave of the Fireflies hanging out companionably in an urban setting. But as things wear on, it becomes progressively harder to figure out where the story is coming from.

No clue as to what's real

In particular, the nature of reality in Tekkon Kinkreet is fluid and confusing. When White jumps off a building and floats on his back as if in a hammock to illustrate how Black should just relax, it might seem like poetic whimsy, the kind of thing Ed in Cowboy Bebop (a very similar character) does all the time. But much later in the film, characters who actually can fly and have other undefined powers suddenly and without explanation pop into what seemed like a straight-up gangster story, with no previous hints of the supernatural. And that shock pales before the film's climax, which makes symbolic sense but is baffling on a story-reality level.

So rather than analyzing it in too much depth, it's probably best to ride with the story as long as possible and concentrate on drinking in the unconventional visuals, which make Treasure Town as brightly colored and densely detailed as a near-bursting sack of Halloween candy. Heavy use of computer-assisted navigation lets Arias move his point of view around like a live-action film camera, sending his characters on dizzying runs through the street and following a bird on a stunning sky-level tour of the city. The setting is impossibly rich, the kind of world viewers could easily get lost in.

The characters are far simpler, and severely stylized in a distorted, floppy fashion that often resembles crude children's drawings. The pinheaded policeman and Joker-grinning Snake are particularly odd-looking, which is sometimes a distraction.

All that aside, though, the storyline is ambitious, unpredictable and absorbing. Tekkon Kinkreet is long for a non-Miyazaki animated feature; Arias gives his characters time to just sprawl out and be themselves, and much of the film feels unhurried and discursive, a bit wandering and purposeless but colorful nonetheless. Themes of nostalgia and attempts to preserve the ephemeral present run heavily through the film, as with so much anime, but in many ways—design, technology, diversity—this is anime with its eyes more firmly fixed on the future even than most overtly science-fiction stories.