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Sunday August 23, 2009

Car craze

By ROLAND KELTS


The adrenaline-pumping anime Redline, an effort targeting Western audiences, not surprisingly has its roots in Texas.

MANGA Impact: The World of Japanese Animation, a special programme at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival (Aug 5-15) in Switzerland, featured the world premiere of the Japanese anime Redline in the city’s historic central square before 5,000 viewers on Aug 14.

Step on it ... Redline has been described as Speed Racer on speed.

Also extending tributes to Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam), Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies) and the Gainax studio (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Manga Impact was devoted to furthering the West’s highbrow embrace of Japanese pop culture.

Redline, from Madhouse Studios, is one of a growing list of 21st-century Japanese-produced anime features that seek to return that embrace by deliberately targeting Western audiences.

“We really want non-Japanese to see and appreciate this work,” says Takeshi Koike, Redline’s director and chief animator, in the Tokyo offices of Tohokushinsha, the film’s worldwide distributor. “We were thinking of people who don’t normally enjoy anime or know anything about it when we came up with the ideas.” (The film is scheduled for release in Japan in Spring 2010.)

The “we” he refers to is himself and veteran film director, screenwriter and illustrator Katsuhito Ishii (The Taste of Tea), who began collaborating a decade ago on the edgy underground film, Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl.

Ishii was immediately drawn to Koike’s distinctive style and skills, which he describes as a next-generation cross between the action-oriented bravura of Yoshinori Kanada (who worked on many Studio Ghibli films) and the meticulous design and artistry of Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll).

Ishii first encountered Redline’s eventual target audience several years ago, when he stayed with a friend in the flatlands of rural Texas and discovered a phenomenon jarring enough for a Tokyo urbanite to record. Unlike city dwellers in such places as New York, rural Americans spent their weekend hours lovingly washing, polishing and endlessly tinkering with ... their cars.

“They really love their automobiles,” he says. “And they dream about them. So I wanted to create a story that featured really cool cars and fast action. I wanted to make an anime that wouldn’t be for urban Americans, who already know about anime, but would be attractive to those people in the countryside.”

Red-letter day ... director/chief animator Takeshi Koike (left) and screenwriter/illustrator Katsuhito Ishii before the world premiere of Redline in Locarno, Switzerland, on Aug 14. – Photo from Image.Net

The result is a film that piles hybrid upon hybrid – a racing film that blasts into sci-fi apocalypse, as a corrupt alien government seeks to destroy the mortal drivers who dare to compete on their alien planet. The action is relentless, allowing you to catch your breath only in brief interludes, yet the imagery is dense with anatomical grotesqueries – like Lucian Freud on acid, or, if you view Redline as a kind of meta-anime, an anime about the stylised thrills of anime itself, Speed Racer on speed.

At the still centre of all this heady overdrive is, improbably, a kind of love story. The very human JP, the story’s protagonist, is a “regular, average racing car guy with greased-back hair,” Koike says. “He’s no one special, but he wants to win. And then he falls in love.”

The object of his affection is Sonoshee, a childhood flame who has grown into a cute, well-endowed blonde babe and a fearless competitor with a penchant for speed.

JP and Sonoshee join forces by the end of the film, and it is a safe bet that Ishii and Koike will join forces again, too.

“I want to work with him every chance I get,” Ishii says. “He’s the only animator who’s able to realise and execute what I want to express.” – The Daily Yomiuri / Asia News Network

■ Roland Kelts writes the column ‘Soft Power Hard Truths’ for ‘The Daily Yomiuri’ of Japan. He is a Tokyo University lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York, and is the author of ‘Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.’.

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