Whenever I explain to friends my criteria for what counts as a five-star film on Letterboxd—a rating I rarely dish out—I put it like this: every film starts at three stars and shifts up and down as I watch. Four stars means you’re objectively good in my book; four-and-a-half stars means I had one little gripe I couldn’t shake, keeping you from being perfect. Five stars means you irreversibly changed how I view cinema as an art form.
In all my years of watching anime, Redline is my forever five-star film.
Whenever I’m running on empty and need a pick-me-up, I fall back on my three heavenly kings of racing movies: Mad Max: Fury Road, Speed Racer, and Studio Madhouse’s 2009 anime film thrillride, Redline. They’re the kinds of films I’d drop everything to watch, would give anything to experience for the first time again, and would levitate off the ground if I ever dared to watch them in the same evening. But of the three, Redline edges them out as the one that has me charged up all the way up.
Directed by Takeshi Koike—whose résumé includes The Animatrix and Samurai Champloo—Redline follows JP, a rockabilly racer who participates in high-octane intergalactic races in his souped-up “honey” yellow Trans Am. Although his fellow racers kit out their outlandish vehicles with all sorts of weapons to get a leg up on their competition, JP is old-school. He’d rather win simply off the merits of his muscle car being the fastest. Despite his pure love for racing, JP’s never managed to win because his crew makes more money fixing races with gangsters whenever he loses.
JP’s luck shifts gears in grand fashion when he qualifies for Redline, a no-rules race gathering the best racers in the universe every five years. And this year, the betting pool is so ridiculous that the cash-out could buy entire planets. But the race is also more hazardous than ever. The planet acting as Redline’s racetrack is Roboworld—a shoot-first, ask-questions-never hellscape run by a meathead totalitarian regime eager to obliterate any racer who dares to set foot on its soil with extreme prejudice.
Even the extrajudicial threat on their lives isn’t enough to sway JP and the rest of the field—including the circuit’s gorgeous rising star, Sonoshee “Cherry Boy Hunter” McLaren—from air‑dropping out of Roboworld’s stratosphere to compete for the glory of winning the big one.
While listening to Redline‘s bopping OST by James Shimoji already makes me feel like I could run through a brick wall, rewatching the film all these years later is nothing short of a full-body high. The movie truly has everything: a simmering romance, dramatic double-crosses, cars spinning out like Beyblades skipping across stretches of water, magical girl-transforming vehicles suplexing drones, and kaiju battles. Translation: it’s a smörgåsbord of everything cool that could happen in an anime, concentrated into a feature film liable to make your Fitbit think you’ve been running full speed for an hour and 42 minutes.
Mercifully, the film does take its foot off the gas with a slower (though no less madcap) second act, giving you a breather between its two races. Here, Madhouse spotlights its eccentric cast of alien racers, guerrilla insurgents, military generals, shoutcasters, and spectators from around the universe, who are just as amusing to watch in debaucherous commercials and interview segments as they are on the racetrack. Even though they’re all introduced in rapid succession, weaving in and out of Redline‘s war-torn spectacle, the film gives each person just enough of an entertaining wink of characterization for you to instantly grasp their place in the wild world they inhabit.
As if dodging missiles and lasers in the aggro PVP zone of Roboworld weren’t enough to propel this wacky fever dream into high gear, every waking moment of the races, sandwiching its second act, is hellbent on inventing new ways to showcase speed. It’s exhilarating, verging on exhausting, watching its racers hurl themselves through setpieces where their cars look one rev away from either burning out or detonating like rockets as they scream past their competition. And even though I have practically every moment of the film etched into my gray matter, I still can’t help but pop off from my couch, witnessing all the wild anime bullshit Redline has to offer.
It’s no wonder Redline was cherry-picked as one of the first anime titles to hit the Criterion Channel—it’s an all-timer. You can feel all seven years and over 100,000 hand-drawn frames that Madhouse painstakingly poured into every impossible (occasionally bitrate-crashing) crowd shot, blood-vessel-bursting nitro boost, and trippy kaleidoscopic explosion of the film. All these years later, Redline remains every bit as deserving of being dubbed the future of animation as it was in 2009.
You can watch Redline on Tubi.
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