Word: racer
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...blending with robot suits and race cars in order to vanquish the bad guys. And in doing so, they've provided plenty of standard action-movie pleasures. Iron Man gives you a guy flying over L.A., disrupting military aviation and confronting a villain in even larger metal couture. Speed Racer boasts enough auto-erotic car-nage to make Grand Theft Auto IV seem, by comparison, like a jalopy junkyard...
...control of their destinies by building beautiful, useful machines with which they're perfectly in synch. They could be the garage geeks who paved Silicon Valley with cybergold or Hollywood's visual-effects alchemists translating their fantasies into pixels to create gorgeous movies like these. Iron Man and Speed Racer are tributes to practical ingenuity and manual dexterity, to real American innovators like Edison and Ford, Steve Wozniak and Dale Earnhardt--to the grease monkey as genius...
Iron Man is based on a marvel comic character introduced in 1963, Speed Racer on the Japanese animated TV series Mach GoGoGo, launched in 1967. The two new movies share the scientific optimism of that time, when the study of physics was, briefly, both a patriotic duty and a nifty option for American students; when doctors began installing artificial hearts; when President Kennedy said we'd go to the moon within a decade...
That's certainly true of Speed Racer, in which the texture is the text, and it's deliriously dense. Renouncing literal sense (Is the film set in the '50s or today? In America or Britain? Who knows? Who cares?), the Wachowskis have created a fantasyland that is part retro, part nextro. It's a rich, cartoonish dream: Op Art in nonstop, Mach 2 motion...
...actual car was used; these magnificent set pieces are almost totally animated. The Wachowskis' desktop dervishes invented so many new techniques, they had to create a bunch of new names for them. Effects supervisor John Gaeta itemizes some of them in the forthcoming book The Art of Speed Racer: "Faux lensing," "Photo Anime film format," "designer shape de-focus," "infinite depth of field," "bling and super-bling flare enhancements" and "candy-inspired Techno Color." You can tell that everyone had liberated fun making the film; it feels like the group effort of Mensa kids let loose in a paint store...