Shelf Life

From Me to Yu

Oh right, the plot. If this the first time you're reading about Redline, here it is: our pompadour-ed protagonist Sweet JP drives a Trans-Am in intergalactic races in the distant future against other, far more alien looking vehicles and drivers. Unfortunately, JP's childhood best friend and mechanic Frisbee owes money to the mafia after using shady loans to buy JP souped-up car parts. After the preliminary Yellowline race which opens the film, the Redline finals are set to take place on Roboworld, a militant planet that opposes the race and will do anything to stop it. Several racers back out, afraid of the lethal danger, but not Sonoshee, aka “Cherry Boy Hunter,” who also happens to be JP's crush.

The first thing that hit me about Redline was the lack of shadows in favor of dark black inks. Redline has bright contrast-y scheme that looks like no other anime (except the director's previous work, “World Record” from The Animatrix). Second, “everything” is hand-drawn. In this day and age of all CG vehicles, it is a ballsy film that insists on hand-drawn cars.

Although the packaging and extras say “hand drawn hand drawn hand drawn,” the film was obviously digitally painted (as opposed to cell painted). In the “Redline Perfect Guide” one of the staff was clearly using Maya (the 3D graphics program) to add CG birds, and another staff member layers on a lot of digital reflections to metal and leather. If you add Photoshop-style lighting effects using a Wacom tablet, is that hand drawn? Maybe it's more hand drawn than calculating the reflectivity of NURBs surfaces. Redline might fly in the face of computer graphics, but let's not kid ourselves, it also benefits from current technology.

The other significant bit in the “Red Line Perfect Guide” is an interview with Takeshi Koike and Katsuhito Ishii where they talk about how much plot was dropped from Redline. A lot of unused back story was written that didn't make the cut, and I think that's just fine.

In the first class I took in film school, after each screening of a student's work, our professor asked the student what they were trying to accomplish. If the film achieved the director's goal, the professor considered it a success. Koike and Ishii say over and over again what they were trying to accomplish in the extras: they wanted to make a fun movie anyone could enjoy. I believe they achieved that goal.

Redline is nothing if not accessible. Compare that to another technically accomplished anime feature, Akira. Although it is well-loved, Akira tried to adapt too much (unfinished?) manga. It's hard to follow, and so violent as to completely isolate some viewers. Redline has a little nudity, but you can loan it out to far more friends and relatives than Akira.

I'm not immune from the blogger buzz about Redline, and I immediately bought the Japanese Blu-ray when it came out, choking down the international shipping fee. I can definitively say that it's worth buying the American BD even if you own the previous release. For one thing, the extras I keep mentioning weren't on the Japanese BD. The subtitles have been cleaned up with a smoother translation, and the dub adds a ton of character. I was a little bored during the Roboworld command center scenes watching the Japanese BD, but the dub performances and translation made the very same scenes pop this time around. The translation is so much better that I felt the entire film made a lot more sense in just one viewing. I particularly love the gravelly-voiced Liam O'Brian as Frisbee, but I'm only lukewarm on Patrick Seitz as JP.

OK, almost all of the translations are cleaned up. Some English intertitles in the Perfect Guide are left in hilarious Engrish. For example: “The thing which wants you to take it in from REDLINE?” (Presumably a better translation would be: “What do you want viewers to take away from REDLINE?”)[TOP]