The beauty of Anime is that you can present a world effortlessly more exagerated than the ones we usually see in live action. Any sense of reality and physics can gleefully be hurled out the back window in favour of wild setpeices and outlandish vision that would simply look fucking ludicrous in real life. However, while most forms of Anime do this as standard, I might actually have to go out on a limb and declare Takeshi Koike’s 2009 Redline as possibly the most crazed example of the art form I’ve ever witnessed.
Now, I realise that’s a hell of a statement to make, especially considering some of the concentrated insanity that Anime has been delivering since Japanese animators put pen to paper; but even compared to some of the most famous perpetrators, Redline aggressively edges ahead by delivering a high-octane, fuel-injected slice of rockabilly nonsense that moves so fast, it’ll strip the enamel of your damn teeth and yet curiously leave your luxurious, extravagant hairdo in one piece…
In a distant and highly eccentric future, crazed super-races are held that draw the frenzied attention of the entire galaxy as a colourful bunch of reckless daredevils cling tenaciously to the controls of absurdly tricked out vehicles. One such race is the Yellowline that is currently tearing it’s way across the surface of planet Dorothy and as brash young human racer, “Sweet” JP, frantically attempts to come first, it slips his mind that the mafia boss he owes needs him to come second. “Luckily”, JP’s alien childhood friend and mechanic, Frisbee, is on hand to thwart his attempt with a secretly planted bomb hidden in his car and allowing Sonoshee “Cherry Boy Hunter” McLaren to ultimately win.
However, in a weird quirk of fate, the battered JP manages to qualify to enter the Redline race after a couple of the other participants have backed out – but what would it take for of a couple of hardened, veteran Redliners to refuse to race? How about the fact that the race is to be held on Roboworld, a planet run by militant, cyborg zealots who haven’t taken kindly to the news that a race this highly publicised will probably cast some unwanted attention on all their morally iffy military projects. But even though the Roboworld president vows to eliminate any Redliner who sets a single tyre on the surface of the planet, the racers all remain non-plussed as they prep for the big day on an demilitarised moon.
As we are introduced to the weird and wacky racers who will soon do battle and unimaginable speeds and the various beefs they have with one another, we find that unbeknownst to JP, Frisbee is about to pull off another fix for the mafia much to the chagrin of his junk dealer Old Man Mole.
As the race starts and the accumulated military forces of Roboworld decend, who will emerge victorious from the head spinning carnage, and what is the mysterious past that connects rivals JP and Sonoshee?
In case I didn’t really get my point across before, Redline is really, really, really fucking insane – and this is coming from a man who grew up with the exploding heads of Fist Of The North Star and the eyebrow raising carnage of Urotsukidoji. On paper, it’s basically a simple racing story, the likes of which you’ve seen thousands of times before that includes all the welcome sports tropes. You want a super confident, lead with a supernatural talent for racing and yet somehow can’t win a race to save his life? You want a grizzled team mate on his crew who acts as a protective parental figure despite having six limbs? You want an array of borderline deranged competitors all armed with ferocious racing machines that looks like someone sprayed the characters of Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races with liquid PCP? This film has you covered in spades, it’s just a devestating shame that Redline seemed to mark the end of the artform in its classic incarnation.
To step outside the outrageous in-film events for a second, Takeshi Koike oversaw the making of Redline for a staggering seven years that resulted in a flabbergasting 100,000 hand drawn cells, which may prove to contain some truly impressive statistics, but it also helped usher the rise of more computer led animation styles that could be whipped out in a fraction of the time with only a fraction of the staff. Historically speaking, it’s a fucking shame feature length hand drawn animation went the way of the dodo, because believe it or not, it does make a difference and you certainly can see it in Redline. I’m not entirely sure how the animation manages to keep up with the absolutely batshit imagination of Koike – although I’m sure the seven years certainly helped – but the results speak for themselves; actually, they don’t just speak, they roar with the scream of a souped up space engine.
Essentially taking the podracing sequence from The Phantom Menace and smooshing it through the surrealist prism of a particularly unhinged issue of sci-fi comic 2000 A.D., the plot maybe thinner on the ground than moisture during a drought, but seeing as Anime has always mostly been a style over substance genre anyway (not a complaint), those fucked up visuals do the heavy lifting with muscular efficiency.
It’s here I feel I should drop any sense of critical professionalism and just gush wildly about the lunacy that screeches past your eyes with blinding speed. For a film that displays such dialogue as “Mr. President, we can’t let Funky Boy run loose like that; he’s going to destroy Roboworld!” without a shred of irony, subtlety is predictably thin on the ground, but who fucking needs it when JP and his resplendent bouffant travels as speeds so fast, he starts bleeding from the nose. The character designs are straight out of the surrealism handbook; with sentient piston person Machinehead tipping a bio-mechanical nod to Tetsuo: The Iron Man and deranged duo, Lynchman and Johnny Boya coming across like a psychotic Batman and Robin. On top of this, there’s the nubile couple who drive a car in the shape of a pink, feminine mecha (why yes, they do pilot from the boobs, why do you ask?), a random appearance of the aforementioned Funky Boy, the kaiju sized bio weapon that looks like a giant, glowing, screaming baby and various instances of reality warping nitrous pills that causes out heroes to achieve skull compressing speeds. Does a lot of it fail to make any logical sense? Certainly, and sometimes the action gets so frenzied and chaotic, sometimes you get violently buffeted about the place like a brick in a spin dryer, but when the visuals are this lush, witty and downright cool, it’s actually hard to quibble when it all blows past you at hundreds of miles per hour.
Those looking for the nuance and depth of story you’d usually find in your average Studio Ghibli release may be confused at the unfettered, obnoxious carnage that rampages directly in your face; but when it comes to animated thrills and spills, there is absolutely nothing to beat Redline across the finish line – it’s just a shame that it was to be one of the last titles to wave the checkered flag on the old-school practices of hand drawn animation.
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