OK, so… Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) is a big stupid idiot obsessed with race cars; the extent of his big stupid idiocy on the subject we learn through the magic of flashbacks, wherein his teacher tells his mother (Susan Sarandon) that her son (played as a child by Nicholas Elia) is a little stupid idiot obsessed with race cars to the exclusion of basically all else. Ah, the perils of nominative determinism. Also, like, his dad (John Goodman) builds race cars, so it’s not really a good environment to stop him thinking about race cars all the damn time. Something he likes almost as much as race cars however is his considerably older brother, Rex (Scott Porter), who is a race car driver. Apparently, the Racer family wait like fifteen years between kids, because the third brother doesn’t appear in any of these flashbacks. Regardless, don’t get too attached to Rex, because he’s dead. Dead in a big fiery explosion. A big fiery explosion as a result of a car crash. Is this the incredibly unhealthy reason as why the old man and Mrs Racer have another child afterwards? Who can say? I do feel like I’ve said ‘race car’ far too much already. Anyway, yeah, however long later, Speed’s made his racing debut because he’s too thick for anything else. This isn’t a joke, by the way; they do actually mention that this is basically all he’s qualified to do at this point, but it could be worse as he’s like a savant on that front, and also his long-term girlfriend, Trixie (Christina Ricci), has LOADSAMONEY and is also totally hot for motorised transportation! Anyway, yeah, his incredible driving skill as an independent soon have sponsors knocking at the Racer family door, and none are more knockingy than one E.P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam), who offers all kinds of crazy crap to get the boy to sign with him. Pops doesn’t trust big corporations though, so Speed apologetically refuses. Unfortunately, Royalton doesn’t take it all that well, and decides to drop the bombshell that, in fact, the entire racing championship is rigged and it’s all a massive power game between the big companies who ‘compete’ to make each other richer, and also there’s a load of bribery and mob enforcement to involved. Racer Motors is, therefore, fucked. Whoops. Fortunately, the mysterious and disreputable Racer X (Matthew Fox) is on hand; in fact, he’s working in league with the authorities to try and expose the corruption at the heart of the championship and also he’s totally not the aforementioned brother who faked his death, whatever gave you that idea, and he’s managed to convince the powers that be that Racer Motors will play a key part in cleaning up the sport.

That might be the longest summary of the first part of a film that I’ve done yet.

Oh, well, yeah. The Wachowskis. Theirs are some odd careers, aren’t they? They made The Matrix back in 1999 and seemingly have been trying to live up to it ever since. The Matrix was, of course, a huge success at the box office and with audiences and with critics though perhaps not the degree that you might expect on that last one. Its sequels tended to get progressively cooler receptions though not really box office gross (that said, the third one made about $30m less than the first film with a budget more than twice that of said first film, so it probably qualifies as a ‘disappointment’ by big studio standards despite well clearing the standard rule of thumb of ‘you have to make twice the budget to start making a profit’). Eh, well, anyway, this here Speed Racer adaptation was their first film in the director’s seat… er, directors’ seats… since The Matrix Revolutions (2003). It seems like a difficult ask. There’d been attempts to get a live-action type Speed Racer off the ground for nearly fifteen years before they signed on. Beyond that, it’s kind of a weird property to begin with. There had been attempts to revive the franchise in both Japan and America in the ‘90s, both of which failed pretty badly, though oddly the original TV adaptation from the ‘60s managed to rerun over and over as I recall in the same sort of period. I remember watching it. Honestly, I remember thinking it was a bit dull, but my brother hated it, so I made a point of watching it. Haha, children are terrible. Where was I? Oh, yeah, so this was something no one seemed to be able to figure out what to do with. Evidently the Wachowskis did have an idea they were able to get by the brass, though I’d presume this is based rather on having made The Matrix more than anything, as the finished product seems like potentially a hard sell. It’s a bizarre amalgamation of family drama, white collar crime thriller, and Death Race 2000… for kids… with a bright candy coloured palette and copious CGI environs that don’t even begin to try and look realistic.

By this point, the gritty reboot of your nostalgic property was all the rage. You could probably blame Batman Begins (2005) and especially The Dark Knight (2008), though let’s be honest, making a darker rendition of Batman, at least post-1970 or so, is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel, especially so after things like The Dark Knight Returns (the 1986 comic of that title, not the film of the same name that acts a sequel to the aforementioned Dark Knight) and The Killing Joke (1988); I’d expect most people of my age were more familiar with the somewhat darker takes on the character from things like the Burton films or the 1990s animated series than the old Adam West series, much less the Silver Age comics that influenced it and it in turn influenced in an Ouroboros of campiness, by the time the Nolan films rolled around. (What about the Joel Schumacher films? Well, as I recall, people tried not to talk about those too much even at the time.) What feels somewhat more indicative are things like Transformers (2007) when it comes to gritty reboots of old properties apparently targeted towards people who were children the first time around, though we also have things like Death Race (2008) which do their utmost to suck any semblance of fun out of the original’s premise. While this is obviously a tangent, I’m largely going into this to try and highlight the milieu into which this Speed Racer was released. It pretty much eschews any pretence at being ‘darker and edgier’ instead doing its utmost to try and conform to the sort of tone and aesthetic that the original had and making no attempt to try and excuse the more absurd elements but rather revel in them. People didn’t go for it and the film only making some three-quarters of its production budget at the box office, and apparently totalling about an $80m loss after marketing and that.

Honestly, it’s take on the material is probably the best course of action, even if I’ve seen purists scoff that it’s not set in the ‘60s, its brightly coloured and ultra-artificial retro-futurist world is by far the most competent rendering of an anime world into a live action one that I’ve seen.† The Wachowskis apparently wanted to make a film that their nieces and nephews and that could actually watch (well, watch and be suitable). As such, the film stays quite safely in family friendly territory to the point where it’s almost a joke in and of itself; there’s a scene wherein Speed and Trixie enjoy a romantic dinner with champagne coupes full of cola à la Joan Crawford, complete with a plastic soda bottle sitting dead in the ice bucket. While the tone should be erratic, it somehow manages to feel entirely reasonable in its shifts between low key domestic scenes and brash racing scenes, quiet corporate intrigue and loud action scenes.

More than anything though, for all its lunacy and its erratic tone, it has a profound sense of earnestness. A recurring bit of oddness about the Wachowskis is the oddly personal nature of their projects, and even this, the garish anime adaptation, has a sense of sincerity about it that’s lacking in many films of its type. They’ve spoken a bit about trying to emulate a stream of consciousness in its aesthetic and editing, with the idea that ‘why do it with this one?’ being because children are (they claim) less set in their idea of ‘how film (or other forms of art) should appear’ than adults. When it’s pointed out, it’s easy to see; the film enjoys frenetic editing where the vast quantity of shots bleed into each other. They don’t cut, they don’t fade, they just kind of shift. It’s quite impressive, but it’s also a vehicle for them to discuss art itself in the abstract. There’s an awful lot being juggled, but, fair play, it manages to keep most of the balls in the air throughout. The various parts seem like they’re quite heavy for a child-centric film, but children are more knowing than filmmakers often give them credit for.

Also, it’s not about a child having awesome cool action-packed adventures, which I always thought was like the worst type of children’s media back when I was, like, seven. (The Joe 90 problem, if you will.)

† Well, western ones anyway. While I’ve said before that Japan also tends to struggle with live action adaptations of manga, stuff such as Our Little Sister (2015) often works fine. Of course, things like that aren’t the properties that Hollywood is all about trying to adapt.