Redline

Seven years in the making, with four years alone spent on creating the 100,000 cell drawings, Redline is a retro-futurist anime in cranked-up overdrive, its visual and auditory extravagances firing past you in a bewildering collage of zig-zag line, comic book colour and metal on metal sound.

And if that wasn’t enough, it also sports the most minimal of narrative anchor points, its storyline and action constantly veering off into the outer reaches of intelligibility. All of which is deliberate on the writers and director’s part, evidently – Redline was conceived of as a film that tests narrative sense, all the while pushing the limits of what anime can achieve in the early 21st century.

It does this, paradoxically, by eschewing the (now) commonplaces of CGI animation effects and instead returning to the roots of the form: old-fashioned cell animation. Every character, every pimped-for-the-future racing vehicle and planetscape are the result of thousands of hours of cell by cell drawing by the animators – and it all works extremely well, giving the film an aliveness to the furiously cascading forms and a vivid, dynamic line that it might very well have lacked if they had chosen otherwise.

Anybody who remembers the work of comic books great Jack Kirby will immediately recognise the visual style of Redline. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine that he wasn’t a direct inspiration for the look of this film, so reminiscent of his many panels for Marvel Comics are the characters and the future-baroque racing machinery.

So what is the story about? That’s sort of a dumb question, because pretty much as soon as one begins watching the film, one realises that that’s not the point at all. It’s a trip really – a very fast, delirious trip in primary colours, vibrating black lines and bright, sparkling explosions. Just relax and let the images and sound disassemble your sensorium…

Okay, there are the bare bones of a story for those who like that sort of thing. “Sweet” JP is a hero of the intergalactic race circuit and he has been chosen to race in the greatest race of all: Redline, this year to be held on the planet Roboworld. Roboworld is ruled by a race of militaristic cyborgs, and they aren’t too happy that their planet has been chosen to host the race – all that galactic media attention may reveal their top-secret military technology.

As fate would have it, the Redline racers (JP, “Cherry Bomb” Sonoshee McLaren, Metalhead, Frisbee and twin Lolita pop-star racers, the “Super Boins” – and that’s just the beginning of the list) will be racing towards a zone where the Roboworld cyborgs have hidden, weapons-of-mass-destruction style, a gigantic bioweapon called Funky Boy. Some disgruntled miners in giant mecha-style suits disable the planetary defenses of Roboworld, thereby inadvertently releasing the monstrous Funky Boy to wreak havoc at the height of the Redline race to the finish.

And so we too race to the finish, amidst what can only be described as anime chaos – a delirium of twisted, going-who-knows-where narrative lines, toothy, jittering grimaces and fan-boy images of nymphets in jump-suits. Along the way we are treated to a gigantomachy between General Volton (transformed from cyborg into a kind of monstrous octopus-whale) battling Funky Boy in a Godzilla vs. Mothra style punch up, “Sweet” JP renewing his childhood passion for Sonoshee McLaren and an apocalyptic race that would have made Filippo T. Marinetti and his Futurist cronies proud.

Writer Katsuhito Ishii was the director behind Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (1999), one of my favorite films of the last days of the millennium. I thought that film was pretty wild at the time, but Redline is even better. For my money, the seven years it took to make were more than worth it. Of course, everything that I like about Redline may be all the reasons that would make you avoid it. That would be a pity, as Redline is the sort of anime that may well serve to vivify a form of filmmaking that has become a little too safe and predictable recently.

The DVD has some interesting interviews as extras, and a strange little trailer for “Redline 2006” which one supposes is a “proof of concept” trailer made before Redline went into production. Who knows? In any case, don’t hesitate: jump quickly to “play feature”, and enjoy the ride.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Redline
Directed by Takeshi Koike
Japan, 2009 (DVD released December 2011), 101 mins

Out now on DVD and blu-ray
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Rated M