Ask John: Is Redline the Next Akira?

Question:
Is Redline being toted as the next Akira by Western anime fans (mostly U.S. and UK ones)? Despite bombing in Japan, I’ve seen many posts on blogs and anime message boards treating the movie Redline as the thing that’ll revitalize the Western fanbase and in fact, the anime industry itself.

Answer:
I really don’t like being cynical or pessimistic, but certain questions require honest answers. Director Takeshi Koike and writer Katsuhito Ishii’s sci-fi racing feature film Redline is a spectacular work. Although its pace lags a bit in the middle, the film’s bookend racing scenes are exhilarating. The film’s entirely hand drawn animation is lushly detailed and lovingly animated with a fluidity and detail that I personally haven’t seen in anime in years. On a purely technical level, Redline is amazing. On a visceral, affective level it’s very fun and wickedly creative. But despite all of its strengths, it has one achillean characteristic that will doom it to limited international success. Its character design is distinctively Katsuhito Ishii’s.

Redline is actually a psuedo-sequel to Koike & Ishii’s 2003 OVA series Trava: Fist Planet. Despite the Trava anime having English subtitles on its Japanese DVD release, it’s never been officially released in America, nor has it ever been especially well-known or popular in America because it has a visual design and style comparable to Hiroyuki Imaishi’s 2004 movie Dead Leaves. Note that both of these productions have a comparable visual design to Madhouse & Peter Chung’s 1997 TV series Alexander Senki, which is quite abhored by American otaku. In 2004 Manga Entertainment tried its best to promote Dead Leaves as the next major breakthrough anime hit. Despite a massive advertising campaign, Americans did not like Dead Leaves because Western animation fans – both American and European – largely dislike the visual aesthetic of lanky, disproportinate characters with muscle mass in odd places. The two Afro Samurai anime installments had visceral and highly stylized action and narrative, yet despite not looking like typical anime, they were both tremendously successful because they still had a fairly conventional visual and character design. The Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt TV series has a humor and frenetic energy comparable to Dead Leaves or Redline. It was successful because it has a visual aesthetic that Americans are used to and enjoy. The only noteworthy difference between popular anime like Panty & Stocking and Afro Samurai and unpopular anime like Trava, Alexander Senki, Dead Leaves, and Redline is their typical visual design. Regardless of how exciting or fun to watch Redline may be, the majority of Western viewers invariably won’t like it because they literally don’t like the way it looks.

Redline was first screened at the Locarno International Film Festival on August 14, 2009. In the two years since its first public release it hasn’t launched any sort of technical or spiritual revolution or revitalization in Japan’s production industry. The film is absolutely a magnificent accomplishment, but it’s an exception. It’s the sort of rare, periodic work that comes out of Japan’s anime industry that reminds both animators and otaku of the potential that anime is capable of. But it’s a throwback, a reminder of the exquisitely excessive productions of the anime industry’s golden age, not a standard bearer for a new era of expensive, indulgent anime productions. Films like Redline are made as much for other animators as for hardcore anime fans. These sort of films are too outré, too unusual to actually appeal to a mass mainstream audience, either in Japan or internationally. I appreciate the hopeful fan sentiment that a film like Redline will generate a massive new groundswell of appreciation and fascination for exceptional Japanese animation. But the hopeful sentiment is unrealistic. Anime that look like Redline have never been successful or popular in America and probably never will be, outside of a relatively small cadre of hardcore otaku.