Machine Hayabusa was itself part of a tradition.
Redline movie series#
In a world where everyone is a cheat and cars are fitted with boosters, rockets and wings, only Ken Hayabusa, noble racer with the Saionji racing team, is prepared to play by the rules, in a series of raging races, animated with a loving interest in the technology of tomorrow lurking beneath the cars’ various sci-fi engines. In Machine Hayabusa, the world of formula one racing has been changed forever by the activities of a bunch of soulless swindlers, the Black Devil Team, led by the nefarious “demon lord” Ahab Mobildick.
Redline movie tv#
He was, however, a much more impressionable ten years old in 1976, when TV Asahi broadcast the 21 madcap episodes of Machine Hayabusa, an animated series that took the clichés of sports shows and combined them with an exuberant sci-fi plotline.Īt dinner before the film’s world premiere in Locarno, Ishii told me that Redline’s true inspiration was his childhood love of Machine Hayabusa, and his wish to make something that had the same sort of energy.
Wacky Races was broadcast in Japan in 1970 as Chichiki Machine Mo Race ( Furious Crazy Machine Race), but we ought to remember that Katsuhito Ishii was only four years old at the time. Some have suggested that Redline’s prime inspiration must be the mismatched cartoon competitors of Wacky Races (1968), but the old Hanna-Barbera show does not have quite the footprint or following in Japan that one might expect.
But it is also the latest entry in a long tradition of sporting anime that began in the 1960s with tales of baseball, volleyball and martial arts, before diversifying in the 1970s into ever-crazier car-racing stories. His anime feature is tricked out with vibrant primary colours and larger-than-life caricatures, entirely beholden to a single aim: winning.įive years in the making, and drawing on a shadowy undertow of obscure short films and festival experiments, Redline is unapologetically brash, unforgettably loud, and mercifully short, clocking in at a mere 97 minutes. Koike’s filming frequently “crosses the line”, switches directions, or bends the perspective of his characters as if they and their vehicles are symbiotic life forms. The film’s imagery is a 180-degree spin-out from the naturalism of Isao Takahata or Satoshi Kon’s careful recreation of the real. Even those racers who are not literally plugged in to their seats are twisted, bent and broken by g-forces. Redline is in love with the physicality of cars. The result is sheer mayhem, as if the cast of Top Gear raced through minefields on the North Korean border, or the cast of the Cannonball Run took on Darth Vader. Nice guys finish last, which is why the odds on JP are a mouth-watering 25,000 to one. But our hero’s nickname is “Sweet JP”, a sneering epithet hurled at him by the others because he’s too fair-minded to use landmines, rocket-propelled grenades or tactical nukes just to win a race. Takeshi Koike’s Redline plays as if it is the finale of a massive series that unites multiple unrelated genres in the anime world: one participant is a fairy princess another seems to have escaped from a beat-em-up arcade game still another is a machine-man who is literally plugged into his vehicle.
The sheer risk is too much for several fellow racers, whose withdrawal from the competition puts JP back onto the starting grid, so long as he is prepared to cheat death in a race against killer opponents and enemy soldiers. Roboworld’s Supreme Leader is determined to teach the racers a lesson by killing them all, preferably, before the cameras of the galaxy’s media outlets descend on Roboworld and take pictures of all his super-weapons, cyborg armies and doomsday devices. The next race – the highly illegal, immensely prestigious Redline – is held only once every five years, and this time is scheduled to cross the face of Roboworld: a deeply private, heavily armed fascist dictatorship. Meanwhile his double-crossing colleague Frisbee is merrily counting the cash from an evil interstellar syndicate that has rigged the race. It’s all over for the good-hearted racer boy JP when his souped-up Trans Am crashes at the finish of the illegal Yellowline contest on planet Dorothy.
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