Much of anime prescribes to a “more is more” design principle—practicality and logic be darned—and many a transformation sequence has benefited from it. By contrast, Tekkon Kinkreet triumphs because it delivers two hours of arresting visual poetry, and its able to root its visual fancies in character and story. Its Charles-Dickens-by-way-of-James-M.-Cain plot loses emotional punch by the end, and the elementary vocabulary used to visualize the third-act moral struggle seems beneath the rest of the movie, but I suspect the mess has some of the best design and layout work I'll ever see. It deserves a viewing.