Yes­ter­day I reviewed Mar­dock Scramble from the Leeds Inter­na­tional Film Fest­ival. Today: Red­line

Red­line

Someone showed the Japan­ese ‘Wacky Races’. They were not impressed. “They call this ‘wacky’?”, they said. “We’ll show them wacky”.

You have never seen an anime like this before.

Red­line is an experience.

The story is about some punk-ass racing driver JP. He’s got­ten him­self into some match-fixing scan­dals but, due to some unfore­see­able coin­cid­ences, he wound up qual­i­fy­ing for Red­line, the worlds biggest racing event. The only rule is your vehicle must use wheels. Plus, to make things inter­est­ing, they decided to hold the race on Roboplanet, home to a war­ring civil­isa­tion who vow to kill any racers who dare enter their planet. Why hold the race there? So the TV rat­ings for the galaxy air­ing of Red­line shoot through the roof and so the anim­at­ors have plenty of oppor­tun­it­ies to anim­ate pretty explosions.

Not that any of this really mat­ters. The plot is a tedi­ous frivolity that’s just there to jus­tify the crazy sequences they put these char­ac­ters through. You couldn’t even hear the expos­i­tion and explan­at­ory dia­logue over the explo­sions, rev­ving engines and thump­ing soundtrack, to the point that sub­titles would often appear on the screen when I couldn’t hear any­one actu­ally say­ing any­thing. The real sign of this is the final scene, which I won’t spoil, but acts as a sign by the cre­at­ors that you weren’t meant to be tak­ing this ser­i­ously in any way, shape or form. It’s such a bril­liantly corny way to end the movie that you can’t help but applaud the auda­city of it all.

Red­line is all about the visual exper­i­ence. As little import­ance as they might have had, it’s really a shame I had to pay some degree of atten­tion to the sub­titles because I prob­ably missed so many little details. Each scene is full of little eye­c­atches to com­pli­ment the over­all pic­ture. From the Red­line cham­pion Iron­head, a 3 metre tall fella with a head of, sur­prise sur­prise, iron, strok­ing his teeny tiny dog dur­ing an inter­view, or the hero in JP’s dream snog­ging two girls at once, the movie is full of these little amus­ing details that act as winks to the audi­ence. I’d almost say it didn’t have enough of these, which is kinda like say­ing Death Note needed more Latin chant­ing, but I could have done with a few less explo­sions and a few more cars fly­ing through the air with their wind­screen wipers on. There’s only so many ways you can make an explo­sion look inter­est­ing. I’m pretty sure Red­line used up every single method, and made up a few of it’s own, but the eccent­ri­cit­ies with anim­at­ing other incid­ents is what made me love this movie.

Red­line is aim­ing to have as much fun as pos­sible. That’s how the brain behind the series works and drives what the movie does next. Com­pare this to Panty and Stock­ing for a second. P&S uses the auda­city of it’s anim­a­tion tech­niques to pro­voke shocked responses of “OMG did they just do that!?!”. Red­line uses it’s anim­a­tion for the power of fun. You can tell how much the cre­at­ors enjoyed work­ing on this. If any­thing, it looks like they might have had too much fun and were forced to cut out parts of the movie to make it more man­age­able. There cer­tainly appeared to be a chunk of the final race miss­ing as it leaped from mid­way point to the fin­ish line. All things con­sidered, they prob­ably made the right choice if they cut out some scenes from there. The movie was just the right length, any­more might have killed the fun just that little bit, but it did leave the final race feel­ing a little bit disjointed.

Ulti­mately, because of the dis­reg­ard for nar­rat­ive, the movie doesn’t hold much weight. Hence I don’t think it will make quite the splash some of the early reviews pre­dicted it would make. But Red­line is such an incred­ibly fun film that I find it hard to see how people won’t get sucked in by it’s atmo­sphere and inten­tions, grin­ning like a maniac right the way through the film. Are you not enter­tained? Is this not why you are here?