#Lynchman

[thebutcher-5]

Redline (2009)

Benvenuti o bentornati sul nostro blog. Dopo tanto tempo, nello scorso articolo siamo ritornati a parlare di cinema italiano e per la precisione di un film italiano anni ’60, una delle migliori decadi per il nostro cinema, e l’abbiamo fatto attraverso un film del grande Luigi Comencini, Tutti a casa. L’8 settembre 1943 viene proclamato via radio l’armistizio e i soldati italiani festeggiano la…

[oddygaul]

the REDLINE manifesto

In honor of my second DIY screening of Redline, here is, at long last, a prettied-up version of my most popular reddit post, an unabashed love letter to my favorite movie. Most of this is probably less groundbreaking than it was when I first posted it a decade(!) ago, but whatever, the internet needs more Redline content anyway.

REDLINE Trivia

–JP stands for Joshua Punkhead, and in the very first draft he had 26 children and raced to pay off his child support. Also, the catchy moniker ‘Sweet JP’? English-only… the original Japanese gets the mouthful ‘very sweet weaponless prince’.

–You'd be hard-pressed to tell without looking into the lore a bit, but Miki & Todoroki are damn near the only actual humans in the movie; everyone else is some species of alien. Some are obvious, like Shinkai (Oceanic/Chikulun hybrid) and Trava (Anista tribe), but even the most human-like characters are some other race. Sonoshee, for example, is listed as being half human, half Oceanic tribe (海洋族). 

The most curious case, though, is JP. While it'd be easy to assume he's human, there's a lot of details that don't add up: his unique elf ears, his super-lanky-even-for-a-Koike-character-design physique, the fact that his race is conspicuously redacted on his bail sheet… and his seeming immunity to death. Seriously, bro crashes every single thing he drives in the whole movie, then emerges unscathed with just a fiery flash of the eyes – that ain’t normal. If I had to wildly speculate, and I do, I’d put money that he’s somehow linked to Mikuru and the Giant species, as seen in Trava: Fist Planet. The physique matches, the Giants have displayed some preternatural healing abilities, and Trava lays the groundwork for a few other threads in Redline (namely, the existence of bioweapons and Shinkai & Trava’s past military experience), so there’s precedence. Maybe one day we’ll find out for sure…

–We all know and love Funky Boy thanks to the Roboworld president’s endless tirades. But the giant data-motivated crocodile monster Volton fuses with to engage Funky Boy in thrilling combat? She is a lady, and her name is Wire Girl.

–All of Redline’s vehicle and mechanical designs are nuts – they’re insanely complicated and filled with organic curves and details. Despite the immense difficulty of keeping such complex designs consistent, every mechanical shot is hand-drawn, without the aid of any CG. To help the animators stay on-target while drawing, the team made some sweet-ass production models for them to reference. What I wouldn’t give to own one of these…

–Before deciding on Redline being a film, writer Katsuhito Ishii and director Takeshi Koike considered making a TV series. Initial writers’ meetings saw the team fleshing out a comprehensive story bible about the setting: it included not only a wide-scope view of the universe and its history, but also detailed backstories for each racer. Even after deciding to make a feature film, Redline’s initial script gave each racer as much time and focus as the final cut gives to JP & Sonoshee; all of this was, unfortunately, cut for time. According to Ishii, though, much of this ancillary information made it into the novelization…

one day my Japanese will be good enough to read you ;_;

–Confused about why the movie ends with that sparkly, PowerPoint-ass ~LOVE~? Well, you shouldn’t be – Redline is ‘unabashedly dumb’, after all, per Ishii – but there is a little context. Over the course of the movie’s 7-year production, Koike and Yukiko (a producer on the film) fell in love, tying the knot in Switzerland just before Redline’s world premiere. If that doesn’t justify the ending for you, I don’t know what could.

–This isn't trivia but idk where else to put this stupid-ass Lynchman meme I made

Subtext you may have missed on first watch

–Machine Head is Sonoshee's estranged father?!

Crazy, I know, but hear me out. 

First of all, Redline unambiguously shows the viewer that Sonoshee and Machine Head have some sort of pre-existing relationship, the nature of which isn’t explicitly clarified. 

At the Oasis restaurant, Sonoshee tells JP she's waiting for someone; it may sound like she's simply brushing him off, but the moment Machine Head enters the scene, Sonoshee perks up and waves to him. When the Crab Sonoshee is flipped by missile fire during the Redline race, we get exactly two (2) Dramatic Anime Freezeframes: JP and Machine Head, implying those two, out of everyone, care the most about Sonoshee. During the final stretch of the race, as Machine Head prepares to pop his steamlight, he is not only aware that Sonoshee also has one, he taunts her about it:

“I see you still have your steamlight – got the guts to use it this time?”

JP even draws attention to the fact that Sonoshee’s looks identical to Tetsujin’s. Finally, though this is certainly ancillary, it is interesting to note that the exact moment Godwing loses its structural stability is right after JP declares he’s going to win because he, not Machine Head, has Sonoshee at his side.

So let’s line this up with what backstory we definitively know. As stated above, Sonoshee is a human / Oceanic hybrid; Machine Head, though his body has been modified beyond recognition, is referred to the same way. While talking to JP about the steamlight, Sonoshee says her father is the one that gave it to her, then describes him as a skilled racer who ran a junk joint. In that same conversation, when JP suggests she’s too focused on racing at the expense of personal relationships, she bristles and tries to end the conversation. During the flashback of young Sonoshee racing, her reaction to crashing is intense: she’s clearly holding herself to a higher standard, and is already dead set on racing in the Redline someday.

Now, there’s other plausible explanations for all this; maybe there’s just a romantic entanglement between Sonoshee and Machine Head, with JP barging in as the third vertex of a love triangle. But is that the most likely scenario for two people constantly characterized as putting racing before any personal matters?

No, I think Machine Head is Sonoshee’s father. 

Picture it: Machine Head raised Sonoshee at his junk joint, so she grew up around racing and car modification. After seeing success on the circuits, Machine Head stopped being content with mere victory, and started spending all his time and energy modifying his body, pushing himself farther and farther. Sonoshee, feeling neglected and cast aside, turned to racing, seeing it as the only way to get her father’s attention. This lead to her perfectionism complex; if she’s not the very best, why would the King of Kings ever look her way?

Anyway, while it’s not confirmed in the text, I think there’s so many hints it might as well be. It makes JP and Sonoshee’s romance a lot more interesting, too. Their arc isn’t just two people falling in love, it’s about Sonoshee moving past the trauma of her father’s emotional abandonment and opening up to someone new. After JP explains his match fixing history in the climax, Sonoshee isn’t placated because he told the truth, she’s fired up seeing the strength of JP and Frisbee’s friendship: she sees the folly of chasing approval from her absent father, and that she could instead be forming bonds with friends who support her unconditionally. She can race for herself.

Koike and Ishii said Redline is about adult friendships, after all!

pictured: the most romantic kiss in cinema history

–The Redline race is, in fact, underhanded political maneuvering

Now, this one is sorta just The Plot Of The Movie, but I feel like there’s so much going on in Redline people often don’t connect these dots. 

We all laugh at the Roboworld president’s hammy word salad:

“I wonder if this might be some kind of ploy by our enemies to infiltrate our borders. If that’s true, do you realize Roboworld’s military secrets could be at risk here? We’d be exposed!!”

…but he’s… kinda right, though?

At the time of the movie, the M3 Nebula has just emerged from two devastating interplanetary wars. The galaxy’s superpowers are under a tenuous peace agreement – one of the most important stipulations of which is a ban on the use and development of “bioweapons”, which in the Redline universe are less ‘weaponized bacterial strains’ and more ‘gargantuan synthetic monsters that can be deployed to wreak unthinkable destruction’. Despite this ban, the government of Roboworld has been continuing with bioweapon development unabated… and not only does Planet Supergrass seem to be aware of these violations, it really seems like they’re leveraging all their soft power to expose them.

Now, we know Supergrass is generally involved with the Redline final. As a member of the Redline Committee, they have a reason to be involved; they’re helping out with nuts & bolts logistical stuff, like transporting the racers to the course and prepping the finish line. But when you consider the significant, tangible political blows dealt to Roboworld by the race – Funky Boy and Wire Girl’s presumed destruction, Roboworld’s violation of the bioweapon treaty being broadly exposed to the public, the decimation of Roboworld’s military – the long string of coincidences that got us to that point start to seem a little suspicious.

Who pushed for the Redline final to be held on such a hostile planet? Who knew about Roboworld’s experimental orbital laser cannon – a project so tightly under wraps even their president only learns about it during the race – and hired contractors to sabotage it? Who organized a group of malcontents to attack both Roboworld’s power relay station and Funky Boy’s containment creche, right when such disruptions would be the most impactful? And who decided the race’s crucial middle stretch should go right over the restricted military zone housing said creche?

Supergrass has the motive and the means – plus, the race is already illegal, so what can Roboworld do, sue them about it? No sir, that Princess is on some subterfuge shit, and Secretary Titan, that shady fuck, is her inside man. And you can take that to the bank.

Craving more REDLINE?

Unfortunately, due to the movie’s commercial failure, there’s not much else in the franchise. The Redline production pilot is fucking sick, though, and there’s Trava: Fist Planet, an OVA by Koike & Ishii that predates Redline and focuses on Trava and Shinkai’s misadventures. While Trava never got the continuation it deserved, they did make a trailer for season 2... ahh, what could have been.

If you’re just after more of Takeshi Koike’s mind-blowing animation, there’s only a scant few projects in his trademark black-filled style. His most well-known work is probably the Samurai Champloo OP, or maybe World Record from The Animatrix (can’t find a link for that one, but y’know, do your thing). Koike also contributed animation to two other Ishii films: an extended intro for Party 7, and this aggressively horny dance sequence for Funky Forest. Back at Madhouse, it seems the studio liked to use Koike as a bait-and-switch, letting him direct lavish production pilots to secure adaptation rights then switching the staff up for the full production. Feels kind of scummy, but we got the immense Afro Samurai Pilot and Iron Man Pilot out of it. Finally, he made the series of Love shorts for SMAPxSMAP, the SMAP variety show, which are as dope as they are low-res.

I really wanna know if Koike was the one ballin out to CYNE and Gang Starr for this

—

And finally, as I threatened in my last post about Redline: let’s talk thematic depth.

~Thematic Depth~

In conversations online, Redline is often given this caveat of just being ‘eye candy’, or hit with the classic ‘style over substance’ cliche. Now, the phrase ‘style over substance’ has always bothered me, generally – it feels like it comes from folks who have never tried to make art before, who make light of the painstaking work and dedication that goes into creating anything – but it particularly frustrates me in animation. The process of animation is such an absurd, masochistic timesink that it’s a wonder anything ever gets finished at all; something this ambitious being finished, with this level of consistency and polish, is nothing short of a miracle, and to simply call that ‘style’ massively undervalues the whole endeavor. 

Because, make no mistake, Redline is ambitious as hell from a visual standpoint. The consistent focus on kinetic motion and speed, buoyed by Koike’s masterful use of exaggerated perspective, spatial distortion, and dynamic camera work; lots of moving, hand-drawn backgrounds instead of matte pans; lively crowd animation in most scenes; remarkably expressive, constant character animation that imbues personality to every character and never settles for industry standard lip flap dialogue… and all of this using incredibly complex character & mechanical designs, many of which feature distinct alien physiology, and a rendering style with bold, detailed shadows that would be more at home in illustration than animation. It is truly a singular work.

And the thing is, that wild ambition and unfailing dedication to the craft is the message.

The very first moments of Redline, before we see a single car or alien, are a brief series of title cards. I think most first-time viewers, and even many repeat viewers, immediately forget these words seconds after reading them due to the famously high-octane opening act. They read:

“In the far distant future, when cars are giving up their wheels in the changeover to air-cars, there still exist stubborn fools who carry on a vanishing spirit of racing…”

It’s easy to pass over this narration because, well, Redline simply isn’t about this conflict. We don’t see a single air-car racer, and there is no on-screen depiction of this purported old-school / new-school racing divide. So why is it here?

Because it’s the thesis of the whole damn project. Redline is about a group of old-school animation industry vets coming to terms with a changed industry that doesn’t support the type of art they want to create anymore, and their determination to pour their hearts into one last, stupid, beautiful swan song.

Madhouse was founded in 1972 by a group of ex-Mushi Pro staff, including Masao Maruyama and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. A response to Mushi Pro’s shoestring budgets and spartan timelines, the goal of studio Madhouse was to create production schedules where animators could flourish, rather than choosing the cheaper route; as Maruyama puts it, their mission statement was to ‘create animation other people aren’t interested in creating’. And, well, for decades, that’s what they did – Madhouse consistently gave a platform to idiosyncratic creators and produced incredible results. Their film canon includes pivotal productions like Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, Rintaro’s Metropolis, every single Satoshi Kon production from Perfect Blue to Paprika, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the film that launched Mamoru Hosoda into stardom. While their TV output might be seen as more workmanlike, they were still dedicated to creating original stories. For example, despite his proven track record, Masaaki Yuasa was unable to secure funding and creative freedom anywhere else but Madhouse, with whom he produced Kemonozume, Kaiba, and The Tatami Galaxy prior to the establishment of Science Saru.

Takeshi Koike’s formative years as an animator were during this golden era of Madhouse. Poached directly out of high school by Yoshiaki Kawajiri himself, Koike was taken under his wing – his first job as a professional animator was inbetweening for Wicked City, and he’d moved up to key animation roles just one year later. I think Kawajiri’s intent was for Koike to be his protege; in this boom era of animation, with high-budget feature films and OVAs as the de facto standard, creative vision and a unique style is what you’d look for in an up-and-coming director, and Koike had both of these in spades. For a time, this pathway seemed almost assured; Koike’s big-league directing debut on The Animatrix produced one of its most well-received shorts, even amidst an anthology stacked with superstar creative talent.

Unfortunately, the turn of the millennium brought a lot of change for Madhouse and the industry at large. Budgets shrank, and production schedules started trending towards today’s unsustainable nightmare grind. CGI became ubiquitous not for the unique shots and compositions it allows for, but as a corner-cutting method for complicated actors like vehicles or mechas. A certain homogeneity and tendency toward ‘safe’, appealing designs and premises took hold; what good is your off-the-wall, creative worldbuilding idea when the anime industry revolves around merch sales, and generic moe waifus are outselling your original IP ten-to-one? All these industry vets could see the writing on the wall: animation would survive, but things were changing, and the ideals they’d founded their studio around were becoming untenable.

So I genuinely believe Redline is a parting shot from the old guard, a celebration of the era of the industry they cut their teeth on, one last lush, extravagant farewell before they passed the torch to the next generation. Maybe not from the start, sure, but after years of troubled development, progressing slowly due to the team’s meticulous vision, I think they rallied around the cause, dead set on making a masterwork, no matter what. Just look at the talent they attracted, the staff list reads like a best-of: Shinya Ohira, Hiroyuki Imaishi, Sushio, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Sayo Yamamoto, Katsuya Yamada, Takafumi Hori. 

And that’s where we come back to that opening message, about those stubborn fools. Suddenly, that movie chock-full of characters putting everything on the line for their passions feels a lot more personal. Koike is JP, the traditional [animation / racing ] purist who’s become an anachronism and just wants to be able to do things his way; Kawajiri as the God of Racing, who JP’s looked up to since he was younger, giving him one last thumbs as he achieves his goals; and Maruyama as Frisbee, putting his livelihood in danger to buy his team the time and money they need for one last gig, who wants to see his friend finish the damn thing on his own terms, just this once. 

In a way, it makes it heartbreaking that Redline performed financially as poorly as it did; Japan’s frosty reception to the movie is at such odds with the fervor of its creators. But you know what? Redline exists, and it exists without compromises. They did what they set out to do. They made it across that finish line.

—

[maxwell-grant]

After watching I Will Save The Universe For Food and the last Like A Dragon games, I had an idea.

What happens in a superhero universe when superheros and supervillains become obsolete, like knights and cowboys before them?

When society outgrowns their neccesity and the system which they are part stops working how will they adapt to a world that no longer need, wants or supports them?

Which will fight back and which will try to give them a place in this new world?

(If this question is too complicated, just respond in the context of the Marvel universe)

I think that depends on what you mean by "like knights and cowboys before them", because that can mean different things. The simplest answer for these is that you don't have a superhero universe anymore, if your universe is one where superheroes can just vanish into irrelevancy and become historical curio figures that definitely 100% won't need to come back to stop the Anti-Monitor from exploding a world or two, as they always do everytime they have a "but what if we didn't need superheroes anymore?" story in a superhero universe.

Closest example I can think of within the Big Two is, probably the stretch of time between the disbanding of the Justice Society in the 1950s, and however long it takes in the continuity for Superman and the Justice League to be a thing and inaugurate the age of heroes proper, where in-between you have all those less-known almost-superheroes and your Task Force X / Challengers of the Unknown / fringe guys guys running around until the superheroes become the center of the universe again. Alfred's espionage career goes here until it's time for the Waynes to be shot, that kind of thing. And of course, that's not an ending, that's backstory, that's a gap in between proceedings. The DCU didn't stop being a superhero universe during those years and it doesn't really stop being one when all capes are gone in the Kamandi future either, where the lack of dominant superheroes is supposed to be an outlier state.

(And to address the proverbial elephant here: Watchmen is a world where superheroes are depicted as socially detrimental and warped, and yes there's only one guy with outright superpowers, but this is still 100% a superhero world where superhero things have and have happened, where superheroes and masked crimefighters were and still are an incredibly useful thing for the powers that be even in spite of being specifically outlawed. The best thing for the people who live in Watchmen would be for them to live in a world where the superhero was truly no longer supported and allowed to fade into irrelevant fantasy, but they don't, they live in the 35 minutes murder squid massacre world)

If we're comparing superheroes to knights and cowboys in the sense of the archetype, the storytelling tradition they socially occupy, the superhero as a character figure the way knights and cowboys are, then if they go, they go the way those did, and become historical characters and costumed personas within the realm of fantasy. In fact, if this is a thing that can happen or always could happen and the story chugs along just fine, it's possible you didn't even really have a superhero universe in the first place, you just had a universe with superheroes in it.

Which is a thing that can happen, and happens quite a bit in universes that want to take a crack at superheroes but don't want the proceedings to revolve around them. Like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Redline with Lynchman and Johnny Boy, deranged pastiches of Batman and Robin who are very much real superheroes, fighting supervillains and outrunning cars while tanking gunfire and all, they're just not the thing the film revolves around nor are they even the weirdest thing in it, so they don't warp the universe and they're just one more freakish thing about it. The key word here is irrelevancy: Captain Universe is not the protagonist of LOEG, the universe of Redline and it's races do not revolve around Lynchman and Johnny Boy, the Crimson Chin doesn't show up to pull Timmy Turner out of trouble on most Fairly Odd Parents episodes, and etc. These guys are superheroes, they can even solve some big problems, but they are not needed, the universe spins just fine without them, which means they're not really much of superheroes to begin with. It's not for nothing you mostly see this play out with gag characters, or at least, characters whose superhero-ness makes them dissonant next to their surroundings (think Captain Falcon in Smash Bros).

Now, if we're talking about comparing superheroes to knights and cowboys in the real world practical sense of what they were and did, if we're talking about them as part of a system through which they operated and applying it to how superheroes operate, well, then we still have cowboys, and knights, and samurai and all that. Individuals or groups with enhanced weaponry or fighting skills who go around stopping crime and enacting vigilante justice with a mission to defend something / "society". It's just we generally call them cops or private military contractors now. Or mercenaries, if you wanna split hairs a bit and go with the "independent operator who sells his services and brutalizes people for money/political favors", which was what knights and cowboys did also, but they all work within and for the same system.

There's been a lot of commentary already on how the superheroes, as a western action genre, operates as an extension of cowboy stories, most visible when we get to the superhero-supervillain dynamic, the "eternal frontier of gangsters and super-scientific menaces who play the role that Indians take in frontier narratives" as I elaborated here. And it's easy to point out the similarities between cowboys and knights, who comparatively skew a little closer to the mercenary side of things than the "cops-and-robbers" paradigm, but historically tended to benefit from political privileges and whitewashed reputations as adventuring defenders and champions of the community in very similar ways. Works that explore superheroes as an institutional power, like The Ultimates or Worm, tend to touch on this, and how "lucky" these guys are that there's always a bigger villain or monster in the room to fight to justify the continued superhero project. The superheroes can have as many Civil Wars as they want provided there is a Norman Osborn at the end of the day to be the bigger bastard they can settle their differences by punching out.

A story about a society that "outgrowns their necessity and the system which they are part of stops working", a story that abolishes the need for superheroes entirely and doesn't provide them allowance anymore, is a story about a society that would have to, at minimum, either have cops and law enforcement so effective and powerful that there's no room for superheroes or any kind of alternative to even pretend to exist, in which case congratulations, you're writing Judge Dredd, or a society that has completely abolished a need for cops and law enforcement of any kind so thoroughly that superheroes are not needed or able to fill the vacuum either, which is a much taller order and it's the kind of stuff you find in speculative political fiction and utopian sci-fi. But, even that wouldn't even necessarily stop superheroes from being active figures.

Because for one, systems fail, in several ways by design, and superheroes tend to exist in the first place because of that, conceived and presented as a superior alternative to traditional law enforcement. And two, obviously the concept of independent policing exists, the concept of communal policing or unlawful vigilantism and so on, and it's typically the thing that gets brought up as a rebuttal whenever superheroes are criticized for being too much like cops, the fact that they don't answer to law enforcement or government and therefore cannot be exploitative or opressive or, god forbid, that dirty word that starts with f and ends with -ascist. But we already live in a world where vigilantes are not supposed to be needed, a world that doesn't support them, and still they exist. And we do have a name for unaccountable, community-based solutions to crime policing and what those look like, people got very angry at Alan Moore for bringing it up even.

Of course this is an extreme negative example (if no less of a foundational one because of it), there are many many different degrees and reasons and methods by which vigilantes operate, just as there's a difference to the degrees by which heroes associate with law enforcement, but that's part of the issue here. No matter how repugnant a precedent is set by the KKK and others, vigilantism is an extremely popular idea for many reasons and it accounts for so much of why knights and cowboys and superheroes become so popular.

Everyone has their own reasons as to why they would support or become vigilantes, everyone has things and causes they'd fight or kill or die or embrace violence for. So unless we're going the utopian sci-fi route again, there is no rendering vigilantism obsolete, and there is no rendering the superhero obsolete in a superhero universe, even if we completely strip away superpowers from the equation. Vigilantism is and will always be deeply popular no matter how wrong or horrible it is as a thing for people to embrace. There is no pretending otherwise in the aftermath of this

being the most globally beloved political development of the past 5 years at minimum.

Superhero universes trap themselves into the vicious cycle where superheroes are needed to stop super-menaces and even other superheroes, and they all justify each other's existences and they all recreate Cold War dynamics just by existing (and this is something that Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard are gonna be exploring in their upcoming mini The Power Fantasy, so be on the lookout for that), even if just those who become vigilantes to stop other vigilantes from going rampant. But if superheroes aren't on some level impossible to replace, whether it's because they are genuinely necessary or simply too enmeshed into the inner workings of society to be removed without issue or ending the story, then you don't really have a superhero universe.

The questions of what happens when they go, where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods and where is streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds, those I think tend to get explored a bit, but not too much, because generally speaking you write superhero universes to tell stories about superheroes, not to write about what happens to those universes when they're completely and utterly gone and never coming back.

Again, it is entirely possible to have fantastical universes with hero stories in them and not have superhero universes, superheroes are not synonymous with cowboys, knights, samurais, wuxia and other kinds of hero stories either. In fact, if you take a step back from America and away from European and Japanese works exploring said relationship with the US, the idea of a superhero, let alone a whole universe full of them where everything has to revolve around them, kinda shatters. Much as I may be trying to do just that, it is more than a fair bit ridiculous and self-defeating and even a little impossible to authentically put superheroes in the global south, although that is considerably less of an issue when thinking of supervillains. Those can and do crop up whenever and whatever.

And I'm ending on those because, the reason I'm not even really touching so much on the supervillain side of the question because supervillains don't actually need any kind of superhero context to exist, as I keep reiterating they predate superheroes by a significant margin and are far less defined and restricted in terms of how they exist and operate. By design, supervillains can and do exist in systems that don't allow for them and don't want them, it's kinda what they're supposed to be doing even, it's even kinda the main thing that separates a supervillain from a regular villain.

But you don't even need supervillains most of the time to be a superhero. The masked avenger pulp heroes tended to not have them, and the Golden Age superheroes took a while to get going there. You need supervillains only when you're strong and good and long-lived enough at it that you need, well,

[holykhepri]

LYNCHMAN!!!

[notlikingbestgirl]

Redline

[animationilove]

[saint-boss]

I’m watchin OK KO and I caught this reference to the legendary Lynchman and Johnnyoby

[thelazydoodle]

A great animated movie is when you watch it for the 25th time, yet you still get the same feeling like you're watching it for the first time.....

I'm refering this to Redline

[recentanimenews]

Redline Anime Film's Vinyl Soundtrack Pre-Orders Rev Up Today

  Hot on the heels of the Vampire Hunter D launch, the next release from Tiger Lab Vinyl is the soundtrack for cult favorite anime film Redline. Pre-orders for James Shimoji's remastered score go live on the Tiger Lab website today at 12:00pm Eastern Time, available as a 2xLP in two variants.

  Folks in the UK will also be able to purchase an exclusive Redline picture disc from All the Anime on Friday, February 4. 

  You can see the cover art and the variants—including Trans Am Splatter and Cherry Red—along with the full tracklist below.

    Tracklist:

  Side A

1 Yellow Line

2 Inuki

3 REDLINE Title

4 Boy's Memory

5 Winner March

6 ROBOWORLD TV

7 TV Show

8 ROBOWORLD

9 EUROPASS

10 Mogura Oyaji

  Side B

11 OASIS

12 And it's so beautiful (feat.Kitty Brown)

13 Shinkai

14 MachineHead

15 Capture Operation

16 Let me love you (feat.Veronica Torraca-Bragdon)

17 Get The Stones (feat.Andrew O.Jones)

18 Crab Sonoshee

  Side C

19 Kare no shift wa BunBunBun (feat.SUPER BOINS)

20 LynchMan & JohnnyBoya

21 REDLINE News

22 Gori-Rider

23 Miki & Todoroki

24 Put-up Guy

25 Red Angels

26 Three-point decomposition cannon

27 Tension

28 Chatter Void

29 Volton Unit

30 Vertical Drop

31 Moniter Room

  Side D

32 Sand Biker

33 Spinning Car

34 Trouble

35 Semimaru

36 Gangster

37 Flying Finger

38 Funky Boy

39 REDLINE

40 Exceed Limit

41 Dead Heat

42 REDLINE DAY (feat.Rob Laufer)

  Directed by Takeshi Koike and produced at Madhouse, Redline premiered in 2009. It's an absolute must-watch if you haven't seen it yet, and it's available on Blu-ray, to rent or purchase via outlets like Amazon, and streaming for free on Tubi. 

  Description: 

A daredevil driver and his secret love face off in the most dangerous and exciting car race in the universe. Takeshi Koike (THE ANIMATRIX) directs and animates this high-speed thrill.

    -------

Joseph Luster is the Games and Web editor at Otaku USA Magazine. You can read his comics at subhumanzoids. Follow him on Twitter @Moldilox.

By: Joseph Luster

[oddygaul]

The Taste of Tea

At first, I found The Taste of Tea almost frustratingly slow-paced. Once I matched its speed, though, that lethargy became engrossing. Though in a vacuum many scenes feel like they go on too long, spending those long, uninterrupted moments with the characters plants you in their world. Often, awkward conversations in movies are broken up with jump cuts or camera changes, communicating that the situation is uncomfortable but providing an escape hatch for the viewer. The Taste of Tea will let a shot linger unmoving for an entire, excruciating encounter, forcing you to live that moment alongside the character.

This ethos is echoed in the scenes with the Haruno family by highlighting moments that don’t feel particularly important. In American movies about families, even those that attempt to portray non-romanticized relationships like Little Miss Sunshine, the establishing scenes tend to show heightened moments: whether it’s bickering, loving banter, or full-on chaos, they try to convince us the people we’re watching are a real family by showing emotional highs. Much of the Haruno family’s time together, though, is spent not doing shit, be it lazing around, drinking tea and zoning out, or simply napping together. And somehow those dull moments resonate with me more.

there is banter, of course, the peak being “why are you a triangle??”

Similarly, though The Taste of Tea has its share of oddball gag characters, they’re more grounded than the weirdos of Ishii’s truly wild Funky Forest. For the most part, after an outrageous introduction, we’ll see that character pop up around town, just going about their business. It’s a nice touch that seems to say, hey, these ‘freaks’ are real people, and they live here too. This gentle acknowledgement and acceptance of everyone’s eccentricities permeates The Taste of Tea in its entirety, leaving a lasting impression of kindness I appreciated.

Ishii really has his favorite collaborators: Tadanobu Asano (Frisbee), Tatsuya Gashuin (Lynchman), and Ikki Todoroki (Todoroki) are all here; Takeshi Koike animates a fun sequence that made me realize he must be the one who keyed Redline’s “violence is the only thing that gets me off anymore” scene; and Hideaki Anno is here again for some reason, wearing a shirt with puppies on it.

Speaking of, a fun little easter egg I noticed for the eagle-eyed Koike freaks (i.e. me and only me): they used some of what appear to be Koike’s real planning documents for the Afro Samurai Pilot as set dressing for Yoshiko’s home studio. It’s funny how instantly recognizable his character sheets are, just from the posing and stylized proportions. It’s a little hard to see due to the resolution, but to Yoshiko’s left are the storyboards for the pilot; up and to the right we have the character sheets and expression sheets for Afro and Justice; above that is a background reference for the bridge the pilot opens with. The timing lines up – Koike finished the Afro Samurai pilot in 2003, likely right around when The Taste of Tea was filming for its 2005 release.

neat!

[highcoo]

Friday January 15, 2021

Like the Lynchman says

“If you can believe it, it’s

Friday once again”

[romeodavo88]

via Viral Flash

[broelbrakinsp]

Sweet Animation!

[thelazydoodle]

God I still love Redline

I remember the first time watching it on youtube for free, I was still in art school and I couldn't help but keep watching it. I've at least watched no more than 5 times before I bought it Blu ray. It's a great film to come back to watch and enjoy the ridiculousness of the animation and art style of the movie. Luckily enough apparently it's streaming free again on YouTube with ads.

I highly recommend watching this movie if you enjoy animation, it's free, you won't be wasting money and you're sure as hell not wasting your time.

[captain-asparagus]

REDLINE - Lynchman & Johnny Boya

[trz-airmaster]

Lynch and Johnny!