This one completely confuses me. It's
the trailer for Speed Racer, a movie adaption of the infinitely-cheesy cartoon that I assumed would be insipid, family-friendly garbage along the lines of a children's version of Transformers. I used to watch Speed Racer when I was about 8, and I hated it even then. I watched it anyway, since it was a cartoon and I loved them, and it ws anime before anyone knew what that was, but even at that age I was appalled by the idiocy of the characters and bored by the absurd, repetitious plots.
The
wikipedia page is a geekfest and goes into infinite detail about the original Anime, the Westernization of it, and talks about the great, complicated plots. I'll admit the possibility of those elements if you are very forgiving and you watch every episode in sequence on DVD, but for me at age 8, watching one episode a day at my grandparents' house during summer vacation, I got none of that. I enjoyed the car racing, thought the assorted bad guys were too silly to believe, wanted Trixie to die in a gas fire, and hated sidekicks Spritle and Chim-Chim with a passion. Even decades later, my memories of how stupid every car race was in Speed Racer remained strong enough that they ruined the Pod Race scene in Episode One, since it was essentially a recreation of every Speed Racer cliche. Automotive sabotage to overcome, the hero catching up in 10 seconds after a 5 minute delay, cheating enemy drivers with illegal weapons on their vehicles, an annoying sidekick in the trunk, an unsustainable body count, frequent closeups of the worried relatives/friends in the stands, pro wrestling-like officiating, bad guys set to win until their scheming hubris did them in, and the hero improbably overcoming impossible odds to pull it out in the end. All Lucas needed was a miniature, simianized version of R2D2 in red overalls and the homage would have been complete.
With those thoughts in mind, I clicked the link to view the Speed Racer trailer with a sort of resigned dread. I knew it would be bad, but rubbernecking style, I had to see just how bad it would be. I've watched it three times now... and I'm still not sure. I think it might be good? It's being done by the Watchowski
brothers siblings, or at least the trailer claims it's by the "creators of the Matrix trilogy," and while they've got an uneven track record, they are a creative pair.
If the Speed Racer trailer accurately reflects the film, this is going to be one of the oddest, genre-bending major motion pictures ever released. It appears to be about half-cartoon, with every scene of the race cars slightly less realistic than the NASCAR action in Pixar's Cars. It's kind of like the uncanny valley look of the characters in the new Beowulf movie, but Speed Racer has human actors, not just computerized motion capture nightmares. It's like they shot the whole thing in front of a bluescreen, and then processed it to look intentionally cartoonish. The overly-stylized villains and race tracks and costumes and acting seem to go along that same theme, and after watching the trailer several times, I think they're doing it as a sort of live action anime. The action scenes are being left cartoonish, but the characters are staying super melodramatic like in anime, there are moments of overwrought, overserious drama mixed in with madcap comedy, the costuming is highly distinctive, there are random sections of martial arts and physics-defying action scenes, the logo and graphics are super high tech and seem out of place compared to the cartoonish everything else, etc.
If you're familiar with the conventions of the anime genre, you'll recognize all of them in trailer, down to camera angles, dramatic poses and angles, stark and vivid backgrounds, etc. It's kind of a live action anime in the same way that Sin City was a live action American comic book. Or so it seems from the trailer.
I'm curious to see if that style shows up in the movie, and if so how it's received. Anime is definitely an acquire taste, with the broad characterizations and mixture of comedy and action and violence, and it's a taste that's very strong in niche markets, and among a lot of young people on the Internet, but it's not mainstream pop culture. It's entirely possible that people who know nothing of anime could watching Speed Racer and not get any of that wavelength and still enjoy the movie as a sheer entertainment spectacle; and I guess we'll find out.
A more conventional and much darker trailer is available for
the sequel to the recent Batman movie, which relaunched the series with a more adult sensibility. I didn't like any of the previous 4 Batman movies; the first 2 by Tim Burton were tolerable, but too absurd and flamboyant for me to get any emotional connection to them. The 3rd and 4th were disasters I've only been able to sit through bits and pieces of. I
enjoyed Batman Begins though, and thought it held up well when I saw it again on DVD, so I'm eager for the sequel. I wish it could be rated R and really be dark and grim, instead of just PG-13 semi-adult in theme, but they did a great job getting in scary, subversive stuff with the Scarecrow and the civilization destroying ninjas in the last one, so I've got high hopes for the Joker actually being evil and scary and psychotic in this upcoming version. He certainly sounds it in the teaser, which has zero scenes from the film, but some nice voice over dialogue, principally from Michael Caine as Alfred, the surprisingly-philosophical septuagenarian butler.
Check out the teaser if you haven't already, and feel free to click the smaller size link to get it sooner; there's nothing visual to it that you'll appreciate more at 1024 than 240 pixels wide.
Labels: batman, movie trailers, movies, uncanny valley
