Speed Racer

[osprey_archer]

Thanks to littlerhymes' encouragement, I did watch Speed Racer after all, and actually it was a lot of fun! Which surprised me, because I remembered the general reaction being pretty negative back when it came out, but maybe people were still expecting/hoping that the Wachowskis were going to make another Matrix and had not yet realized that the only Matrix-like quality most Wachowski movies share is that they are kind of bonkers.

Speed Racer certainly isn't going for philosophical depth. It's going for zany visual style ("Like liquid skittles being poured into your eyes," Julie commented), with interior shots that look pretty much realistic and then you go outside and it's like you've walked into a Sims game. It's computer-generated and it's obviously meant to look computer generated and... it's weird! But it does look cool and it's definitely unique and it ceases to be distracting pretty quickly, actually.

And the racing sequences, of which there are many, are lots of fun. It's like watching someone play a racing video game, except with extra emotional resonance.

It reminded me of The Adventures of Tin-Tin, actually. They've both got their own distinctive animation styles, and they're both about action & adventure & derring-do, and neither one takes itself too seriously - and neither one did that well at the box office, possibly because the source material in both cases is comparatively obscure in the US. Which is too bad! I would have liked sequels to both.

Comments

[asakiyume]

So glad you liked it! I loved the color festival that it was, and I adored the revamped theme song (I love the original theme song, from the cartoon, too), with all the different languages. I had never seen drift-racing before, either, so that was cool.

[osprey_archer]

I've never seen or even heard of the original cartoon, but they did a good job making the movie accessible to total newbies, I thought. What's not to love about weird deadly technicolor car races?

[asakiyume]

Oh man. The original cartoon was my favorite thing when I was a little kid. We could only see it when we went to my grandmother's house--it was on a station we didn't get where we lived. The stories were exciting and I loved the faces--LITTLE DID I REALIZE at the time that I was seeing anime or what a role this would have in my later life. Youtube tells me the theme song dates to 1967, but I didn't see the show until sometime in the 1970s.

Go Speed Racer Go!

[osprey_archer]

Speed Racer was your anime gateway drug!

[asakiyume]

YES IT WAS

[littlerhymes]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I love how the movie embraces its own artificiality and just pours everything into that aesthetic - it's not for everyone, but it is totally the product of a clear, focused vision.

[osprey_archer]

The Wachowkis super commit to whatever vision they have for the movies they make, no matter how bonkers, which I admire - well, maybe a bit less in terms of the second & third Matrix movies. But most of the time it results in something interesting, even if it's hard to tell whether it's precisely good or not. It's very much itself, anyway, which is a kind of goodness.