Speed Racer was never as artful, in either the visual or literary sense, as a Stan Lee comic book.
Speed racer car movie#
The movie is as true to its origins as the Spiderman movies are to their own. The laws of physics are more easily suspended than is the disbelief of anyone over age 8.īut all that's just Speed Racer. Now amp all that up, way up, with cutting edge computer graphics.
Speed racer car drivers#
Race results are fixed by evil corporate sponsors, announcers resemble the buffoons in pro wrestling, drivers will do anything to win, and spectators only get excited by crashes. In Speed Racer's universe, race cars leap, spin and twirl in moves beyond those of arcade video games, the racetracks resemble bobsled runs laced with hazards such as giant spikes, and the cars ricochet off one another like BBs poured onto a Hot Wheels track. The Mach 5 boasts more gizmos and gimmicks than all the James Bond cars put together. Real kids like that, like us, always knew the show's cars and racing were ridiculous.
His whole family is that way-cars are their religion. The title character (Emile Hirsch) grows up a car-crazed kid who daydreams about racing when he's supposed to be doing schoolwork and whose mother (Susan Sarandon) tells him he was making engine sounds before he could speak. The show is nominally about cars but the most car-smart thing about it-made more evident in this "live action" computer graphics edition by the Wachowski brothers, makers of The Matrix series-is the underlying theme of automotive passion. The TV show differed dramatically from American cartoons of its era, with "real" people and situations instead of cute animals cracking wise in the woods, but it was still just a kid's cartoon.įor car-smart people, being a Speed Racer fan has always been at best a guilty pleasure. This faithfulness to the original is also the worst part of Speed Racer because at bottom, it was just an after-school cartoon with a silly story, long on hokie contrivance and short on the things that supposedly make good movies, such as characters you care about or social insight. The casting is damned near perfect, the minimal plot is true to the original TV storyline, and the visual effects are a stunning, eyeball-bursting take on the barely realized vision found in the cartoon. The best aspect of the new "live action" movie Speed Racer is that it's everything a fan of the original 1960s Japanese anime cartoon could wish for in a modern, big money, computer-enhanced production.
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