Story-wise, “Speed Racer” is pretty conventional, and faithful to the core of the anime. It’s a classic hero’s tale about the power of family, with Emile Hirsch in the lead role, set to the backdrop of racing and the corruption of its governing powers. Narratively, there are some interesting details about corporate overrule and its tainting of the sporting world. But overall, the plot is merely the basic foundation upon which the Wachowskis can tear the screen up with the most striking live-action visualization of the anime aesthetic committed to cinema so far.
“Speed Racer” is essentially an art film with a nine-figure budget, an Andy Warhol painting blended into a classic anime that takes its source material 100% seriously. It’s kinetic in a way that many traditional racing films struggle to convey, so full of color and light that watching it becomes strangely hypnotic. It’s part cyberpunk, part retrofuturism, part children’s fantasy, and it all makes you wish you could immerse yourself fully into such a dreamscape. So, of course, it flopped upon release, grossing only $93.9 million from a $120 million budget. Critics were initially mixed, with many viewing it as too visually exhausting to be a cohesive film, but opinions have mercifully shifted since then.
It’s not merely that “Speed Racer” looks exactly like an anime come to life; it also embodies the humor and randomness that most adaptations of the medium rush to dismiss. The performers, including John Goodman, Christina Ricci, and Susan Sarandon, nail the cartoonish tone without descending into parody, and Roger Allam devours the greenscreen scenery as a delectable love-to-hate-them villain (but this is, again, a Hollywood anime adaptation where most of the cast is white.) There’s even a chimp! “Speed Racer” so thoroughly embraces the challenge of adapting an anime that it gets rid of realism altogether, and it’s the smartest move the Wachowskis could have made.
By the late 2000s, the American blockbuster was moving towards a grittier styling, more Christopher Nolan than Tim Burton, as the evolution of the Batman series around this time showed. The general agenda was one of giving the most fantastical and ludicrous stories a firm grounding in the familiar. It yielded many excellent results, but we started to see far less of the alternative on a similar scale. “Speed Racer” is as far away from real as you can possibly get and the end result is the most loving and earnest version of a live-action anime adaptation one could ask for. It’s a real shame that other anime adaptations didn’t take this philosophy to heart (imagine if “Dragonball Evolution” had been made in this style.) Despite its commercial underperformance, “Speed Racer” has found a loyal cult following and stands tall as the best in a depressingly unambitious subgenre of adaptations. Let’s hope that future American anime re-imaginings learn the right lessons from it.