Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Redline
2009 · Takeshi Koike · Redline on Sightlines
The picture stops. One held drawing: black ink pooled in the shadows, the pompadoured driver frozen mid-swagger against a flat acid ground. Then the beat ends and the whole thing is screaming again.
Takeshi Koike does this all through Redline, and it's the oddest thing in a film otherwise devoted to never slowing down. A movie assembled from more than 100,000 hand-drawn frames keeps stopping to show you one of them.
Stay with that, because those two gestures are the only two ways anyone has ever put movement into a picture, and Koike runs both inside the same sequence.
Gilles Deleuze opens his book on cinema with exactly this difference. The old way of representing motion was the pose: the sculpted climax, the decisive attitude, the instant chosen because it was the best one. He calls those privileged instants. Cinema arrived doing the opposite. It rebuilds movement out of any-instant-whatever — equidistant slices sampled mechanically, no one of them more important than its neighbour. A camera does this automatically, indifferent to what's in front of it, which is why film could finally show a horse's real gait when centuries of painting could only show the pose a painter believed in.
Animation has to manufacture the any-instant-whatever by hand. Somebody decides and draws each of those ordinary, unremarkable slices, including all the ones nobody will ever notice. Seven years of that, no computer anywhere in it. What hits you as speed in Redline is, materially, labour: a continuity of ordinary instants, each one paid for separately.
And then Koike freezes, and the ancient device walks back in. That held pose is a quotation. Osamu Dezaki's Madhouse pulp — Golgo 13: The Professional — built its drama on dramatic chiaroscuro and the held 'postcard memory' still, and Ashita no Joe 2 had already made the painterly harmonized cel and the high-contrast impact frame into a house style. Koike came up inside that lineage and he takes the freeze literally: at maximum velocity, the film hands you a privileged instant, a picture posed like a poster slapped over the movie. It should break the momentum. It does the reverse. The stop is what lets you feel the other 99,999 drawings, the way a held breath tells you how hard you were breathing.
Why bother with Deleuze here at all? Because otherwise this is 'a cartoon about a race,' and nothing you actually experience is explained by the plot. Deleuze splits cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and everything in the cutting serves that chain. In the time-image, which he finds after 1945, action stops resolving anything: the character watches and endures, and time is felt for itself. Almost all of cinema's prestige since then has migrated to the second side. Redline is an unembarrassed, maximal, seven-years-of-your-life example of the first, made in 2009, when that was no longer where serious ambition was supposed to go. Its ambition is total and it is entirely on the movement side. That's not a limitation to apologise for. It's the thesis.
Deleuze's large form is the shape: a global situation bears down until a decisive act transforms it. A race held once every five years, a militarised planet that wants no visitors, a mafia and a government both leaning on the outcome. The encompassing world is hostile and enormous; the action is one line drawn straight through it. Deleuze hears a respiration in this form, an alternation between the vast milieu and the taut thread of the act, and in a race that breathing is literal — the held enormity of the world, then the pinched tunnel of the track. Force meets force with no ambiguity in it (his binomial: hero against villain, man against milieu). Ambiguity would cost speed, and speed is the budget.
What the film spends that budget on is intensity as such. Thick black outlines throb against acid colour; the saturated colour holds and harmony-cel bravado come down from Space Adventure Cobra, the deep shadow from Dezaki. Deleuze has a name for colour that stops describing objects and starts absorbing the whole scene into a feeling — the affective colour-image — and another, qualité-puissance, for a pure quality presented on its own, detached from anything that has it. Watch what happens at peak velocity: bodies stretch like taffy, engines bloom into abstraction. That isn't a car anymore. It's speed, free of the object that was supposed to be carrying it. James Shimoji's electro-funk works the same way, not scoring the action but supplying the pulse the drawing is keyed to.
There's a real theoretical stake in this. André Bazin grounded cinema's power in the photograph: the camera mechanically records something that was really there, and realism follows from that contract. Redline has no profilmic event at all. Nothing stood in front of a lens. By Bazin's measure it is cinema's poor cousin; by Deleuze's, which locates the medium in movement built from ordinary instants rather than in the photographic trace, it is more purely cinema than most live action, because it has nothing but the movement.
It did nothing to narrative, and that is deliberate. Koike and his writer-producer Katsuhito Ishii — partners since the Trava: Fist Planet OVA, where their retro-heavy pulp look was first fused — chose the oldest premise available precisely because a minimal chassis lets everything else go. Koike's own invention had already been isolated in his Animatrix short World Record: muscular ink, hand-drawn motion-smear, a body deformed by its own velocity. Redline is that at feature scale. Set it against Akira, whose exhaustively detailed machinery and weighted crash choreography made mass the measure of animated spectacle. Koike keeps the density and throws out the weight.
The lineage runs backward beautifully and forward almost not at all. The film flopped in Japanese theatres in 2010, became a home-video cult, then a canonical one, and nothing on this scale has been hand-drawn since. Most important films start a school. This one closed one. Its significance is terminal rather than generative: a medium's complete statement of what it could do, made at the moment the economics of doing it were vanishing. It survives as a standard, not a style.
So watch it again for the stops. And ask whether Koike's freezes actually interrupt the movement — or whether they're the only instrument he had for making you feel it.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — More than 100,000 hand-drawn frames, none computer-generated — movement reconstituted from ordinary, equidistant slices, each one produced by hand over seven years; the taffy-stretched bodies and hand-drawn motion-smear inherited from Koike's Animatrix short World Record
- privileged-instants — The frozen high-contrast hero poses Koike quotes from Dezaki's held 'postcard memory' freeze-frames in Golgo 13: The Professional, and the harmonized-cel painterly stills and impact frames of Ashita no Joe 2
- the movement-image — A driver perceives a situation (the race, the mafia, the government, the militarized planet) and acts to change it; the entire film is the sensory-motor chain at full throttle, with no moment given over to watching or enduring
- action-image-large-form — The encompassing situation — the galaxy's most popular race, held once every five years on a militarized planet that wants no visitors — presses until the decisive act of running it transforms everything
- respiration-space — The race form alternates the vast hostile milieu of the planet with the taut single line of the track, the film breathing between world-scale and the thread of the action
- binomial — Force against force with no ambiguity: the racers against the mafia, the government and a militarized planet's defenses — the pulp opposition Koike and Ishii chose precisely for its bareness
- affective colour — Thick black outlines throbbing against acid colour, descending from Space Adventure Cobra's saturated colour holds and harmony-cel bravado — colour absorbing the scene rather than describing objects in it
- qualité-puissance — At maximum velocity bodies stretch like taffy and engines bloom into pure abstraction: speed presented as a pure intensity, detached from the machine that was supposed to carry it, with Shimoji's electro-funk score running as a second engine
- expressionism — The thick-ink, deep-shadow drawing style descended from Ashita no Joe 2's high-contrast impact frames and the dramatic chiaroscuro of Madhouse's Golgo 13 — light and shadow charging the machinery with a non-organic life