REDLINE
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About.com Rating
Style over substance, but oh what style
People came out of James Cameron’s Avatar complaining that the groundbreaking visuals of the film were undercut by a story that was little more than Pocahontas In Space. You could level the same complaint against REDLINE: its story is little more than a mature-audience retake on the same territory explored in your average episode of Speed Racer or Wacky Races.
But then there’s the way this story has been brought to life, and as with Avatar most of those complaints melt right away. REDLINE was seven years in the making, in big part because the overwhelming majority of it consists of hand-drawn animation courtesy of Masao Maruyama’s MADHOUSE, who also gave us the superlative Summer Wars. It’s become commonplace in anime to use CGI to render environments and especially vehicles, which are typically tricky and time-consuming to draw by hand. Trouble is, those rendered objects and spaces tend to look too clean and precise: they don’t jibe well with the looser, more fluid look of the hand-drawn characters inside and among them.
REDLINE uses some computer assistance—for instance, the basic compositing of the images, and some post-processing—but for the most part, everything you see has been drawn by hand. There’s a boiling, seething, organic flavor to it all; the movie looks and writhes like a living thing, even when most of what’s on screen is machinery and monsters Every ripple of fabric, every angular corner of a vehicle, every crack and contour and glitter of light radiates an aura best described, for lack of any other word, as handmade.
On top of that is a manic, gleeful attention to detail in every shot. There’s a moment when one car loses first one wheel, then the other, then sprouts legs and begins galloping onwards. . Characters are wild agglomerations of visual tropes: I mentioned JP’s insane hairdo, but consider the gangster boss, a vile old creature who’s so rich he has bimbos to help rub his cocaine into his gums—or the “Super Boins,” a pair of pop idols whose own vehicle is part of their tease-show. Equally outlandish is the bizarre subplot involving “Funky Boy,” the massive bio-weapon the Roboworlders have hidden away: when it breaks loose and begins destroying everything in sight, it’s reminiscent of the mutant Star Child monster from the climax of Akira—or perhaps the spectacular hand-animated “Id Monster” from the old SF classic Forbidden Planet. Unfortunately, the movie sort of forgets to give that particular plot thread a proper conclusion—another example of how it’s ultimately an exercise in style over substance. But oh, what style.
The Bakshi connection
The closest parallel to REDLINE is actually not with other anime releases—certainly not popular crowd-pleasers like, say, Bleach or Fullmetal Alchemist. Instead, it’s closer in spirit to the edgy, experimental, adult-themed animated features American animation maverick Ralph Bakshi gave us in the 1970s: Heavy Traffic, Wizards, Streetfight, and perhaps also his stab at an animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Another close point of reference is the 1981 American anthology film Heavy Metal, inspired by work published in the mature-audiences comic magazine of the same name. If none of these ring a bell, they were part of the many (largely failed) attempts in the ‘70s to move animation out of its Disney-pure, kiddie-movie crib and into more challenging territory. The result was a string of commercially unsuccessful films that nevertheless achieved cult followings on cable TV and later home video … and which planted endless stylistic seeds that would flower later on in the most unexpected soil.
It’s not clear if Ishii and the MADHOUSE animators are in fact students of Bakshi, but it sure feels like it. Everything from the boldly-stylized character designs to the future technology of this universe hearkens back to a very 1970s view of the future, when a TV set was a box on a table and a car was a monstrous tangle of piping, fenders and gleaming chrome. It makes for a sly contrast with the super-polished futurism most anime traffics in these days: odds are the future will look just as trashy in its own way as our world does now.
Whatever the influences, and whatever the problems with the story, one thing about REDLINE stands above and beyond anything else: there hasn't been a film this ambitious in its visuals, live-action or animated, in a long time. And given how poorly the film performed in its native Japan, there might not be anything like it again for a long time either. Cherish this. It’s one of a kind.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
About.com Rating
Style over substance, but oh what style
People came out of James Cameron’s Avatar complaining that the groundbreaking visuals of the film were undercut by a story that was little more than Pocahontas In Space. You could level the same complaint against REDLINE: its story is little more than a mature-audience retake on the same territory explored in your average episode of Speed Racer or Wacky Races.
But then there’s the way this story has been brought to life, and as with Avatar most of those complaints melt right away. REDLINE was seven years in the making, in big part because the overwhelming majority of it consists of hand-drawn animation courtesy of Masao Maruyama’s MADHOUSE, who also gave us the superlative Summer Wars. It’s become commonplace in anime to use CGI to render environments and especially vehicles, which are typically tricky and time-consuming to draw by hand. Trouble is, those rendered objects and spaces tend to look too clean and precise: they don’t jibe well with the looser, more fluid look of the hand-drawn characters inside and among them.
REDLINE uses some computer assistance—for instance, the basic compositing of the images, and some post-processing—but for the most part, everything you see has been drawn by hand. There’s a boiling, seething, organic flavor to it all; the movie looks and writhes like a living thing, even when most of what’s on screen is machinery and monsters Every ripple of fabric, every angular corner of a vehicle, every crack and contour and glitter of light radiates an aura best described, for lack of any other word, as handmade.
On top of that is a manic, gleeful attention to detail in every shot. There’s a moment when one car loses first one wheel, then the other, then sprouts legs and begins galloping onwards. . Characters are wild agglomerations of visual tropes: I mentioned JP’s insane hairdo, but consider the gangster boss, a vile old creature who’s so rich he has bimbos to help rub his cocaine into his gums—or the “Super Boins,” a pair of pop idols whose own vehicle is part of their tease-show. Equally outlandish is the bizarre subplot involving “Funky Boy,” the massive bio-weapon the Roboworlders have hidden away: when it breaks loose and begins destroying everything in sight, it’s reminiscent of the mutant Star Child monster from the climax of Akira—or perhaps the spectacular hand-animated “Id Monster” from the old SF classic Forbidden Planet. Unfortunately, the movie sort of forgets to give that particular plot thread a proper conclusion—another example of how it’s ultimately an exercise in style over substance. But oh, what style.
The Bakshi connection
The closest parallel to REDLINE is actually not with other anime releases—certainly not popular crowd-pleasers like, say, Bleach or Fullmetal Alchemist. Instead, it’s closer in spirit to the edgy, experimental, adult-themed animated features American animation maverick Ralph Bakshi gave us in the 1970s: Heavy Traffic, Wizards, Streetfight, and perhaps also his stab at an animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Another close point of reference is the 1981 American anthology film Heavy Metal, inspired by work published in the mature-audiences comic magazine of the same name. If none of these ring a bell, they were part of the many (largely failed) attempts in the ‘70s to move animation out of its Disney-pure, kiddie-movie crib and into more challenging territory. The result was a string of commercially unsuccessful films that nevertheless achieved cult followings on cable TV and later home video … and which planted endless stylistic seeds that would flower later on in the most unexpected soil.
It’s not clear if Ishii and the MADHOUSE animators are in fact students of Bakshi, but it sure feels like it. Everything from the boldly-stylized character designs to the future technology of this universe hearkens back to a very 1970s view of the future, when a TV set was a box on a table and a car was a monstrous tangle of piping, fenders and gleaming chrome. It makes for a sly contrast with the super-polished futurism most anime traffics in these days: odds are the future will look just as trashy in its own way as our world does now.
Whatever the influences, and whatever the problems with the story, one thing about REDLINE stands above and beyond anything else: there hasn't been a film this ambitious in its visuals, live-action or animated, in a long time. And given how poorly the film performed in its native Japan, there might not be anything like it again for a long time either. Cherish this. It’s one of a kind.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
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