It’s all about Redline, the latest work from Takeshi Koike. Brian’s seen it far too many times at the cinema over the last year and a half, and now Anthony’s finally had a chance to check it out. So we talk about it for an hour. Plus: Speed Racer gets belatedly analysed, cosplay updates, shameless spreading of internet rumours and a ridiculous metaphor that Brian can’t remember if he used or not.

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The anime programme at this year’s LIFF was dogged by a sense of incompleteness. You had two films from long running JUMP franchises, the first part of a trilogy that feels more like the first third of a film and the second part of a four part film sequence that is also a remake/sequel of 15 year old TV show. Only the final film felt like a complete finished product.

Gintama The Movie

I’ve seen about 5 minutes of Gintama before, so this film of a story arc from somewhere in the middle of the manga wasn’t really aimed at me. In fact the characters admit as much early in the film. And the action sequences aren’t all that dazzling either.

However, there were amusing gags throughout, gratuitous Golgo 13 references and, more importantly, the pre-credit and post-credit sequences are genius pieces of fourth wall breaking gag writing and have an amusing narrative based around the fact Warner Brothers were distributing the film.

And it made me want to check out the TV series, so in that sense it achieved something.

One Piece Strong World

It’s not the best One Piece movie in terms of being a good film, that would still be the sixth film, but in terms of capturing the characters and more importantly, the tone of the manga chapters that were coming out simultaneous to this, creator Eiichiro Oda’s involvement really pays off.

And it’s more accessible to non-fans too than the Gintama movie, as it’s a stand alone story and provides better visual set pieces. Still it’s not for everyone, the people sitting near me were all new to One Piece, and half found it boring, and the other half found it entertaining.

If you are a fan, you’ll likely love it though.

Mardock Scramble

This felt very much like a good idea that was overcooked by adding too many other ideas into the mix. The film is essentially about rape, and how rape is more about control rather than sex. The problem is it’s so overloaded with other underdeveloped ideas early on that it ends up having to spell it out too loudly in the end, with the lead literally screaming an explanation to another character (and thus the audience).

The jist of the story is that an abused and murdered teenage girl is brought back to life and asked to testify against her murderer. She initially accuses the investigators who brought her back of controlling & abusing her, in that they only want her alive to bring the murderer to justice. She is convinced by one of them, an intelligent mouse-turned-bioweapon, to take the stand, but then she in turn starts to become an abuser of sorts.

And that’s not even getting into the memory thefts, body modifications, post-mortem law, privatised detectives, ridiculously over the top villains/victims and other ideas that over egg Mardock Scramble.

It all results in a film that is relentlessly talky for much of it’s short running time (66 minutes), and for my money animated feature films should never be that talky. Had they cut the techno-babble down and engaged in more visual storytelling it would have been a marked improvement.

It’s not terrible as it is now, the central theme is strong and once established, it stands out from the mess surrounding it. I suspect once the remaining two-thirds are animated it will hold together better (and maybe in the end they can cut it all down into a single, leaner film).

Evangelion 2.0

Moved a bit faster on second viewing compared to when I saw it in May, but still feels like a film that’s all middle. Only thing I noticed afresh was that Mari breaks Shinji’s SDAT player, something I’d missed in my first watch. And thinking about how if she’s supposed to look “British”, and is a delinquent who manipulates adults, if she was in any way inspired by the St Trinian’s books/films.

Redline

Nothing new to add from my first review, beyond the fact it was nice to actually hear the first 10 minutes or so properly this time. Still great and light years ahead of anything else shown on the day.

Cars are raced. Things blow up. Friendship and love.

Animation work by Takeshi Koike is a rare enough occurrence to make it a big deal. Well worth dropping the £30 to go to the Sci-Fi London “Manga All-Nighter” and setting aside two days to recover from sitting in a cinema all night. So it was good to learn that Redline lived up to the hype that my brain had been feeding to itself for the past three years or so.

I could have done without the sound problems we endured for the first ten minutes or so, where they somehow lost one channel on the left hand side. The channel with dialogue and small sound effects in. Nothing important, you know? It was incredibly distracting, making it hard to get into the movie and started the evening on a sour note. Not sure what was responsible for it, the cinema or the digital copy being shown as none of the other films had the same problem. In the end the sound got jiggled around, and while we still appeared to be missing one channel, we didn’t seem to be missing any actual sound.

Amazing how actually being able to hear what is being said and having all the sound effects really helps a film! Particularly one that is charging straight at you, screaming its head off like Redline.

The trailer released last year gives you a good taste of the film, though I don’t believe that, beyond the title animation, any of that footage is actually in the finished film. There are scenes that are similar, possibly even containing some identical key animation, but there’s significant differences in the setting and events portrayed in the trailer and the finished product.

The story that the film hangs its over the top cartoon racing action on is the tale of Sweet JP, a a talented racer fallen on hard times, forced to fix races due to the mafia debts of his best friend. Despite that, due to events in the pre-credits opening race, he accidentally finds himself placed in the top race in the universe, Redline.

Redline is to be run through Roboworld, a planet whose ruler is none too pleased to have the media circus show up on his planet as he doesn’t want his secret violations of peace treaties being shown across the universe. Which will be kind of hard to keep secret as the Redline course is due to go through his secret military compounds.

Finally, JP is falling for “Cherry Boy Hunter” Sonoshee, the racer who beat him in the opening race and who had inspired him to turn pro back when they were younger.

So you’ve got love, friendship, war and really loud cars going really fast – what more can you want from a film?

“We really want non-Japanese to see and appreciate this work”, Koike said in an interview. He doesn’t have too much to worry about there. The character design is varied, expressive and accessible. Just having your characters have lips is often enough to get people over their “I don’t like anime” position. The setting and action calls to mind obvious reference points like Speed Racer, Cannonball Run and obviously Wacky Races. The Wacky Races comparison is worth dwelling on. For starters, Wacky Races is very popular in Japan, so I don’t think appealing to non-Japanese is necessarily going to have negative effect on domestic performance. Secondly, it’s not afraid to go for blatantly Wacky Races style gags amidst all the sci-fi chaos. So fearless is it, that its conclusion is one such gloriously perfect gag.

But there’s other influences there too. You’ve got European sci-fi comics influencing some of the grander sci-fi designs, where Roboworld have apparently designed everything with inspiring awe in mind, rather than practicality. And there’s a Jamie Hewlett influence in there too, most obviously in the Booka-like Trava (returning from Koike and Redline collaborator Katsuhito Ishii’s Trava Fist Planet), but also there was a forgotten Hewlett strip called Fireball that also dealt with a sci-fi take on Cannonball Run / Wacky Races. There’s even some Mike Judge in there with Johnny Boy, the Beavis-looking sidekick to the Batman-styled bounty hunter Lynchman. The breaking down of Koike’s visual influences could easily be a post in itself, needless to say having a frame of reference beyond other anime is a great boon.

Most importantly, it’s a cartoon that’s not afraid to be a cartoon in the loudest, most over the top manner possible. It doesn’t have much more to say than that friendship and love are awesome things, but that’s perfectly OK as it’s saying it in a way that is just as awesome. It’s the first anime since FLCL that’s really clicked with me on a visceral level. If they’d offered me a VHS copy for £100 immediately after the film ended, I’d probably have bought it.

I hope this gets a UK DVD release sooner rather than later, but in the meantime I’d be happy just to see it in the cinema again. So don’t miss out if it you get the chance to see it.