![]() ![]() ![]() It’s devoid of all the embarrassing anime-isms that keep you from showing these Japtoons to your friends who aren’t anime fans and it has enough appeal to entertain the snobs who refuse to watch that “Japanimation” stuff.Ĭontrary to what the trailers show, there’s more here than just racing. Show it to your friends who gave up on anime when they realized everything after Cowboy Bebop was “gay.” Redline looks like the bastard spacechild of a ridiculous pop orgy involving No More Heroes, Heavy Metal, and the Tatooine cantina scene from Star Wars. So fuck those guys, and fuck that Bleach fanboy you know who will refuse to see it because it doesn’t look “Japanese” enough. The losers who line up every year for Comiket or religiously follow Naruto every week can’t handle something this different–it would kick them on their ass hard enough that they’d run back to their hugpillows and pastel color schemes. And maybe that’s OK, because Redline isn’t made for otaku. The truth is that in Japan, movies like Redline will tank and people will spend their money on the Haruhi movies and the 48th One Piece film instead. Redline is the movie that will slap you back to your senses and remind you that cartoons about elementary school kids or pathetic shut-ins are garbage and you want to see cartoons about people kicking ass and looking cool in new and exciting ways. Then, suddenly, you see something that makes you aware that things could be so much better. In this extended metaphor, the current Japtoon industry is the American cartoons of your youth, the Haruhis and the K-Ons are the 25-minute commercial shitshows you woke up every Saturday at 6 am to watch because you didn’t know any better. But Redline in its own way is just like Ninja Scroll, which kicked you square in your pimply teenage face and showed you that beyond the boring, lame Saturday morning American cartoons you grew up with was this world of hyper-detailed robot battles, chicks with huge breasts and blood, blood in goddamn cartoons! The age of the sweeping science-fiction animated film is over, buried in a pile of maids, adorable younger sisters and bullshit purple robots, and we all assumed there would never be another movie like Venus Wars, Patlabor, or Do You Remember Love?. Instead, it will make you feel like you’re 15 again, you’ve just cracked open the door to this unfathomable world of Japanese cartoons and you’re pretty sure this is the coolest shit ever. It doesn’t grovel at the feet of older fans like Macross Frontier and it doesn’t act as an apology to a forgotten fan base like Gundam Unicorn. That’s not to say that Redline is an inherently old-school production. ![]() It triggers your reptilian response to awesome shit, and reminds you of the kind of cartoons you gave up on ever seeing made again. The first 15 minutes of Akira, the first time you saw huge, glorious animated breasts, the first extra-gory decapitation you saw in a cartoon Redline works on this level not because it’s overtly sexual or hyper-violent, but because it will excite you in the same way Japanese animation probably hasn’t excited you in the last 10 years. The animation, the characters and the design work are all worthy of unrestrained praise, but perhaps the most important aspect of the film is the way it makes you feel. Redline is a bizarre amalgamation of Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Racers crossed with a European comics sense of style and an attention to detail that we all assumed the Japanese animation industry forgot sometime in the early 2000s. But for whatever fantastic reason, Redline does exist, and everyone who reads this website needs to see it. In the back of our minds we all know Redline won’t be a hit, it probably won’t even make its money back. With an emphasis on catering to the subhuman otaku masses, dwindling budgets and a contracting industry, that Madhouse would spend seven years working on a meticulously animated, exceedingly creative and exciting original science-fiction film is almost incomprehensible. That’s not to say that I don’t love the fact that Redline does exist, but that it was somehow made in the cesspit that is the contemporary Japanese animation industry is a miracle unto itself. For all intents and purposes, this film should not exist.
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