Description

Pull over and park your car, Speed Racer. There’s a brand-new, supercharged, sci-fi anime road-race experience coming down the highway at top speed. REDLINE takes place in a far-flung, pan-galactic future when antigravity is the preferred mode of transport — except for the few, the brave, the possibly insane who participate in furiously violent races with their massive, mutant versions of the ground-hugging, gas-chugging automobiles we know today. Among the star drivers is Sweet JP. With his slick hair, rock ’n’ roll style and retro muscle car, Sweet JP’s the most dashing of the drivers in the Yellowline race, and almost the winner too — until the last second, when a bomb planted by his mechanic, Frisbee, guarantees JP’s loss and a fixed-match payout for the gangsters leaning on Frisbee. The hospitalized Sweet JP discovers that he has qualified for the greatest of all races: Redline. That’s because two other drivers dropped out, and with good reason — Redline is happening under the noses of the highly militarized leaders of Roboworld, who promise death to any racer in their territory!

Well over a half-decade in development, REDLINE is the heavily hyped new offering from Madhouse, the animation studio that for close to 40 years has been creating or contributing to such innovative anime works as NINJA SCROLL, METROPOLIS and Satoshi Kon’s films and TV series. REDLINE’s striking, dense and dynamic visual style draws as much on U.K. and European comics as it does on anime’s conventions, and it was created with a global audience in mind, particularly motorsport maniacs. There’s far more to it than just roaring engines and races for the finish line, though. The script is by Katsuhito Ishii, writer of live-action surrealist delights THE TASTE OF TEA and FUNKY FOREST (both of which starred noted actor Tadanobu Asano, who voices Frisbee in REDLINE), and for his first feature film, director Takeshi Koike (a key player on THE ANIMATRIX, DEAD LEAVES and SAMURAI CHAMPLOO) insisted on painstaking, high-contrast and highly detailed hand-drawn art, no small task given the hurricane of imagination tearing across the screen. It’s got romance, politics, weird science and wild gags but REDLINE is absolutely an action film, and tops itself at every turn with crazier, ever more outrageous sights and sounds. The grand finale is as explosive as anything in anime history!

—Rupert Bottenberg