Redline - A Review

Imagine if Heavy Metal and The Cannonball Run had a baby. That's about the closest thing I can think of to how to describe the new anime film Redline.

Basically, the premise is such: Eight racers, including the main character, JP, enter the galactic racing championship, the Redline. This race is held every five years, under mysterious circumstances only announced a few days before the race itself. This year, the Red Line is on the planet Roboworld. However, the government of Roboworld is led by a group of cyborg fascists who want no part in the race, making this Redline even more dangerous than ever.

Let me start with this: this is not a film about the plot or even the action, as good as both are. This is a film about the animation. Under the direction of Takeshi Koike (Dead Leaves, The Animatrix: World Record), this film took six years to make because every single frame is hand drawn. The only CGI ever used is for effects overlays on the TV broadcasts. This painstakingly, lovingly rendered cel animation is a joy to behold, and the designs of everything from characters to landscapes in the Redline universe are all unique and crazy but still cool. JP's hair is one of the most ridiculous pompadours in all of recorded history, but it fits with his greaser look. His rival/crush Sonoshee has two-toned green and pink hair and body proportions out of this world. And these are just the humans. Each alien has a unique and funny little quirk, and none ever feel out of place.
 The artbook (which I bought) gives a good look at everything, with both cels from the film and concept sketches, and it's all incredibly detailed. And this is sitting still. The film is even more impressive in motion. The guys who animated the entire engine block whirring away in the opening Yellowline race scene must have had a blast.
The soundtrack by James Kimoji is also fun, though perhaps a tiny bit repetitive at points. It fits well, though, so no complaints. The songs are always well-timed with the action, though perhaps not to the extent of a music-driven anime such as FLCL, where the songs were actually the motive behind the animation. Even so, the soundtrack fits, and does its job. I'd buy it.

The story itself is actually much stronger than I expected it to be. The beginning ten minutes and end fifty minutes are pure action, but that other forty minute act in between is actually pretty good at establishing all the characters. Most of the racers don't have a whole ton of personality beyond what we see in their introductions, but the two main characters, JP and Sonoshee, get a good amount of backstory and current-day exposition. Also prominent are Frisbee, JP's manager and childhood friend, and Old Man Mogura, an eccentric old engineer who builds JP a new Trans Am 20000 after his original one gets crashed in the Yellowline qualifying race. None of the characters are particularly strong, in that you wouldn't be writing an essay about how JP's crush on Sonoshee represents the modern state of masculinity or something silly like that, but for a film that is essentially style over substance, Redline could have done much worse in presenting a full cast of characters.

The last act, the actual race itself, is a mindblowingly fast paced action sequence full of awesome, awesome stuff which I'm not gonna spoil, and the end is pretty cool in that usual "the main character wins but just by the tip of his massive pompadour thanks to a nearly unforeseen Chekov's Gun" kind of way. The race does have the only real low point of the film, however, in that a previously almost-unmentioned-but-hinted-at but huge event pretty much stops the whole thing for ten minutes. I feel like the whole sequence could have been replaced with something much less out of place or perhaps greatly shortened for brevity and then filled in with more racing. Said sequence isn't necessarily bad, however, just a little out of place.

In short, Redline kicks all the ass. The animation is wonderfully smooth, the characters are pretty well developed for such a stylish piece, and the whole thing flows pretty well overall. It really doesn't feel like 100 minutes.

9.75/10