Review of Redline

Once upon a time in the distant future, spaniel bikers in stylish helmets and goggles, lazily sipping beer and smoking cigarettes, watch a crazy survival car race raging in the desert between phantosmagoric racing cars armed with rockets, cannons and machine guns. In front of the spectators is the Yellowline, a qualifying race for participation in the Redline, the main race of the Galaxy far, far away, which is held only once every five years. The participants of the race are worthy of the cars. The main character, J.P. (Joshua Punkhead, i.e. Punk-headed Jesus), nicknamed "Sweet", is a greaser with a huge "pompadour" on hishead, looking like young John Travolta in "Grease". He drives a yellow Trans Em 20000, reminiscent of the American muscle car of the early 1970s Pontiac Trans Em. JP got his nickname "Sweet" because he is the only one of the participants who is not armed, since he prefers to win races due to speed, not shootouts. Another main character, Sonoshee, nicknamed "Cherry Boy Hunter", with the eloquent last name McLaren, is a beauty with light green hair and eyes, stylish aviators with yellow lenses and breasts almost as prominent as the pompadour on JP's head. Her nickname does not hint that she hunts Japanese virgin men, but that she is a virgin tomboy obsessed with cars, while completely ignoring men. Sonoshii drives a red amphibious hovercraft called the "Crab Sonoshee". Tthese are, perhaps, the most normal of the racers. Most of the others are aliens of various shapes, colors and sizes, driving equally phantasmagoric cars.

And so this motley, colorful company, as if descended from the pages of American comics with their deep shadows, and brilliantly, although often surrealistically, animated, rushes, shoots, accelerates and explodes, competing for first place at the finish. Unbridled action rages on the screen most of the time, sometimes interspersed with elements of gangster film noir and unfolding against the backdrop of an interplanetary confrontation between the totalitarian Roboworld, represented exclusively by men who are so carried away by their machines that they themselves have become half machines, and the magical girls - inhabitants of the planet Supergrass. The latter are the organizers of the Redline race, holding it illegally on the moon of Roboworld in order to draw attention to its crimes. All this is sustained in the aesthetics of retrofuturism, with numerous references to the popular culture of the USA of the 1970s-80s. The viewer feels like he is watching an animated comic strip "Cannonball Run" crossed with "Death Race 2000", "Mad Max", the first episode of "Star Wars" and seasoned with "The Running Man" from "The Labyrinth Story". Many of the frames are ready to be printed out and made into posters.

Yet this bright, surreal and beautifully animated action serves only as a background against which the very human stories of love and friendship of Joshua, Sonoshii and two secondary characters unfolds - mechanic and childhood friend of J.P., Frisbee, who got hooked by gangsters and prevents JP from winning races, and Sonoshii's father, multiple winner of the Redline, MachineHead, who turned himself into a hybrid of machine and man. The destinies of these four characters are tightly intertwined with a red thread that draws them into the world of racing.

Sonoshee has been building cars in a workshop since she was a child and racing them with her father, who gave her Steamlight, a booster a hundred times more powerful than nitro. Using Steamlight gives a car a boost that no racer can withstand. In order to cope with the boost and win Redline, Sonoshee's father transformed himself into a cyborg, replacing his body parts with machines and becoming one with his car. When there is introduction of the racers on TV and MachineHead mentions that he has become half-machine, one can see (if one can distract oneself from Sonoshee's naked breasts, of course) how upset Sonoshee is about this. From a conversation with JP, in which Sonoshee mentions her childhood with her father, it becomes clear that she is racing and wants to win Redline in order to gain the approval and attention of her father, whose gradual merging with the machine seems to have damaged his human relationship with his daughter. It was MachineHead that Sonoshee was waiting for in the restaurant when she met JP, and she used the Steamlight her father gave her only as a decoration, since she was unable to use it in the race.

JP became a racer after he fell in love with Sonoshee as a teenager - he was just a spectator when he saw how she, then a child, who did not give up after an accident, but brought the car onto the track and continued racing. For him, participating in Redline is a reason to attract Sonoshee's attention and win her love. Frisbee is JP's childhood friend, who apparently followed JP into racing and became a car mechanic because he wanted to help his friend. He got into debt with gangsters, trying to get money to improve JP's car. Now he is forced to sabotage JP's races by installing explosive devices on his car, and JP himself ended up in prison, taking the blame for Frisbee's fixed races. He wants to pay Frisbee back for getting into debt to improve his car. Frisbee himself feels guilty about sabotaging JP's races and wants to make amends, although he has not yet freed himself from the mafia's hook.

So it turns out that the heroes' motivations are tied to each other and the denouement can only be brought by the race - Sonoshii needs a victory in order to attract attention and earn her father's approval, JP needs to get closer to Sonoshee and repay his debt to Frisbee, and Frisbee wants to atone for his guilt and help JP. Therefore, crossing the finish line in Redline for the heroes is not only and not so much a victory in the race, but also unraveling the red thread of human relations that connect them. It's funny that before Sonoshee was convinced of JP's honesty and agreed to ride with him in the same race car, she was not help, but an obstacle in his path. Sonoshee's words that the race car would become too heavy with her were not empty - JP, no matter how hard he tried, simply could not put his Trans Em, which had fallen on its side, back on its wheels, since Sonoshee was leaning on the bottom of the car, deciding whether to help JP. However, having agreed to help each other achieve their goals and having ended up in the same race car (having entered into a symbolic marriage union), JP and Sonoshee not only did not become weaker, they became qualitatively stronger, showing that in order to use the Steamlight and win the race, it is not necessary to burden your body with dead flesh, merging into one whole with the car, negotiate with gangsters or become a tomboy - instead, they negotiated among themselves, found common goals, distributed roles and became one flesh with each other. Sonoshee was pushed to use the Steamlight by her father MachineHead, apparently not having completely lost his paternal feelings.

In addition to the four main characters, Redline has a lot of secondary ones. Old Man Mole, who is like a fatherly figure for JP and Frisbee, a gravity bike rider. The duo from the OVA “Trava: Fist Planet” – the lop-eared Trava and the sexually obsessed, giant lobster-like Shinkai. “Magical girls” in tight outfits, the rulers of Roboworld and many others. Perhaps, the number of quickly replacing each other characters, as well as the saturation with action, in Redline is excessive. Too many explosions and shootouts, too many plot lines and too high a pace. Excess is the main drawback of Redline. Surreal animation, distortion of proportions, wild hybrids of machines and living organisms often cross the line, and from bright, anime turns into repulsive.

Such excess could also be observed in the post-irony built into Redline, from the names and images of the characters to the main plot lines and the visual style itself: spaniel bikers; half-machine men of Roboworld versus the magical girls of Supergrass; a biological superweapon named Funky Boy; a greaser nicknamed Sweet who has served his prison term; the giga-lobster Shinkai, who eats his smaller brethren with gusto in a restaurant; the beauty Sonoshee, who complains that when she is introduced on TV, the camera focuses on showing her butt - at the same time, the Redline animators offer the viewer to enjoy the spectacle of her naked breasts and suggestive eating of fruits; she, who has thrown off all pretentious "tomboyism" and quite femininely prepares food after an unpleasant acquaintance with the dishes of a local restaurant; Frisbee, looking like an actor from a gangster film noir, doing shady deals with gangsters; four-armed Old Man Mole, dashingly shooting bandits, not forgetting to cross himself, as befits a good alien Christian; "pompadour" - the winner.

Post-irony makes everything shown on the screen be taken seriously and not seriously at the same time. Even the declared theme of Redline - car racing, looks like just a reason to attract the viewer's attention. But, actually, to what end? It looks like the authors of Redline were so carried away by irony that they did not have the strength and opportunity to clearly emphasize, develop and take beyond ridicule the main themes of anime - love and friendship, which, against the background of the ubiquitous post-irony, if they stand out at all, suspiciously resemble meta-irony. This makes Redline feel like a shallow and empty film, a mindless collection of endlessly alternating action scenes and ridiculous animation that only appeals to the part of the viewer's brain that loves high-speed racing, breasts, explosions, and bright colors. These are all good things in themselves, of course, but they are clearly not enough to transcend the boundaries of "art for art's sake" and reach a wider audience.