Am I the only one who found the animated version of Tekkonkinkreet too boring to sit through? I loved the manga, but I thought the film’s pace was plodding.
The Treasure Town backgrounds were gorgeous, and some sequences had the energy I wanted, but the adaptation as a whole seemed to suffer from an excess of reverence. It was like watching a production of a Chekov play helmed by a director who couldn’t accept that it was supposed to be a comedy. (I’ve actually seen very few productions of Chekov plays that were as funny as I thought they should be, come to think of it.) I’m not saying a dearth of humor was the film’s primary failing, but it lacked the kind of messy liveliness I found in the comic.
Or maybe it’s just my ingrained preference for reading comics over watching animated adaptations of them. In comics, I can at least partly set the pace of the experience and fill in the blanks between panels and scenes. At about the 45-minute point, I was desperate for something that didn’t seem meticulously staged, and I started fast-forwarding.
