Redline Review

Takeshi Koike's first feature took seven years and more than 100,000 hand-drawn frames, and every one of them is on the screen. It is a car race and nothing more complicated than that: Sweet JP, a driver who fixes races with a mob boss and his mechanic, is voted by popular demand into the Redline, the most popular race in the galaxy, which this year runs across Roboworld, a militarised planet whose army is determined to stop it.

The story is a pretext and the film knows it. What Koike does with it is why it has a cult: heavy black shadows, faces that stretch with speed, cars and crowds drawn in full rather than cheated, and a final race that keeps escalating long after any other film would have stopped. Tim Maughan of Anime News Network gave it an A+ and called it insanely exhilarating. It failed at the box office and found its audience on home video, which is where most people will meet it; turn it up. JP and his rival Sonoshee get just enough to root for, and the animation carries everything else.