Redline

This film took seven years and nearly finished the studio. Produced by Madhouse, it is Takeshi Koike's directing debut. Every frame was drawn and painted by hand, more than a hundred thousand drawings in total, with no computer animation. In current anime production that choice barely exists. The numbers are painful. Madhouse spent close to thirty million dollars and took eight million at the box office. On the day it was a complete failure; its cult standing arrived later, by word of mouth and through streaming. A reckless racer called JP enters Redline, the most dangerous and entirely illegal road race in the universe. This time it is being run on a militarised planet, and that planet does not want it there. Who it is for: viewers who want to see what hand-drawn animation can do, and who treat the sensation of speed as a subject in itself. Who it is not for: anyone looking for story. The plot is thin, the characters stay on the surface, and the whole thing is designed as a spectacle.