3:AM contributor Roland Kelts has a new column up at the Japanese Daily Yomiuri, devoted to Takeshi Koike’s Redline, which he assures me is set to become big globally soon. The Yomiuri columns are only on their site for a limited period, so will run here also:
At this year’s edition of the Tokyo International Anime Fair, Tohokushinsha Film Corp. devoted nearly its entire booth to Madhouse’s long-anticipated auto-racing adventure Redline–even though it may take nearly another year for the film to be released theatrically.
Redline has been in development for six years, and has been whispered and yawped about via the Internet for at least three. Even Hayao Miyazaki’s hotly pursued projects don’t usually garner prerelease fanfare for half a decade.
As I noted in an earlier column, Tohokushinsha provided me a DVD prescreener of the partially completed film, which I watched during a turbulent flight from Los Angeles into a New York snowstorm–ideal conditions, it turned out, for the wildly kinetic, rough-and-tumble action on the screen, where race car drivers both human and intergalactic were competing in the most dangerous Formula One-style franchises known to man, or alien.
I found the visuals riveting, almost grotesquely so, but this shouldn’t have surprised me. Redline is directed by Takeshi Koike, best known internationally for “World Record,” his installment in The Animatrix, a DVD released in 2003 featuring nine animated short films based on ideas from The Matrix, the Wachowski Brothers’ hit Hollywood film. The Matrix, of course, was itself something of an homage to anime and kung-fu movies, and “World Record” returned the favor with glee, combining an imaginative, elliptical narrative with exquisitely rendered graphics.
I sat down with Koike last week in Tohokushinsha’s head offices in Tokyo. A slight, very youthful-looking 41, Koike fits the profile of so many artists in the Japanese industry–humble, frank about his work and utterly unruffled by either attention or praise. He smiles easily at flashes of humor and reacts with genuine surprise at the mildest of compliments. In other words: Koike behaves like a craftsman.
When I pointed out that both “World Record” and Redline feature competitive events–track in the former, car racing in the latter–Koike said he loves the expansive rawness of the physical being in motion.
“When you see it on TV, it all looks so smooth and beautiful. But if you freeze the frame, the faces and single expressions can be kind of ugly, whether they’re athletes or machines. I’m interested in that tension. And the tension of competition. The pleasure of animation is about bodies in motion. And competition makes that more intense.”
Koike’s art, which freeze-frames Francis Bacon-like expressions of emotional candor, seems pitch-perfect for an era characterized by so-called reality shows like Survivor and contests like American Idol. To view the face of a human in the throes of competition, agonizing over the exertion and the potential for humiliation or glory, seems to speak to our collective need for intimacy.
Koike said he and his chief collaborator, screenwriter Katsuhito Ishii (The Taste of Tea), want Redline to reach a new kind of global audience: suburbanites, country folk and those not so wired into the grid of global pop, but who might spend their weekend hours polishing the fenders of their cars and dreaming of otherworldly ecstasy.
My 3:AM Asia co-editor Steve Finbow also has a piece in the Japanese press this week, with a review of the recent translation of Ryu Murakami’s Audition in yesterday’s Japan Times. His earlier 3:AM review for it is here.
