The sleek computer-animated racecars flip, jump and slide from side to side, but few of their feats elicit anything like the amazement or surprise of, say, watching moderately skilled teenage skateboarders in a parking lot. Yes, the colors are hot, the set design is cool, and the sidekick chimpanzee is cute, but the action sequences the hyperreal video-game kineticism on which the Wachowskis’ reputation for virtuosity has rested are chaotic and nonsensical. But this would be an easier case to make if the visual style itself were not so busy and incoherent. And there may be a perverse integrity in the way the Wachowskis approach the material, which is to focus relentlessly on visual style while dispensing almost entirely with credible emotion or intelligible narrative. You could, come to think of it, spend a pleasant hour in a museum looking at still images and short, looping video installations culled from the hectic, 2-hour-15-minute morass of this movie. And I’ll grant that it is mildly interesting to sit back and contemplate the philosophical and artistic implications of having human actors populate a completely synthetic environment in which the familiar laws of optics and physical movement no longer apply. John Goodman is his dad.) Or a classroom so brilliantly orange? These hues occur nowhere in nature. Look at those red socks young Speed is wearing! Did you ever see a dress as yellow as the one on Susan Sarandon? (She plays Speed’s mom. The colors pop off the screen as if someone had burst a giant bag of digital Skittles. The childhood experience the Wachowskis evoke is not the easy delight of lolling in the den watching one cartoon after another, but rather the squirming tedium of sitting in the back seat on an endless family car trip, your cheek taking on the texture of the vinyl seat as some grown-up lectures you on the beauty of the passing scenery.Īnd yes, some of what you see in “Speed Racer” is indeed beautiful (as is the slyly old-fashioned orchestral score by Michael Giacchino).
#SPEED RACER 2008 SPECIAL FEATURE MOVIE#
Whether we knew it or not, the series was a primer in the aesthetics of Japanese animation, the love of which we could later pass along to our children.įailing that, I suppose we could subject them to Warner Brothers’ new live-action feature film, also called “Speed Racer,” which was written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, the maestros of “The Matrix.” Like so many other expensive, technologically elaborate big-screen adaptations of venerable pop-culture staples, this movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity. Many of us who grew up watching television in the 1960s and ’70s have fond if vague memories of “Speed Racer.” Those big-eyed characters (Trixie! Speed! Racer X!), their mouths never quite moving in sync with the dialogue those bright colors and semiabstract backgrounds those endless, episodic story lines.
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