"Speedracer"- turning cartoon into a movie-concept

This week’s lecture topic was “Visualisation Conceptualisation” and in order to explore this topic more, we watched “Speedracer” which was a movie that came out earlier this year in cinemas. Our task for this week’s blog was to do some research about the movie, the cartoon it is based on and the producers of the movie, the pervious work they’ve done and see if there are any similarities with other works they have made.

“Speedracer” is another example of a cartoon being transformed to a movie concept, in this case with base in Japanese Manga. Manga is the Japanese word for cartoon and is considered to many as an own form of art. It has a characteristic look of how the characters, specially, look like. The movie is based on a “Manga” cartoon strip, called “Mach Go Go Go”, and later “Speedracer”. It was created in 1966, and in 1967 52 episodes was dubbed into English and sent on American broadcast for 20 years. The cartoon is about young Speed Racer who drives his race car, Mach in races around the world. He often gets help from his family who all have a strong interest for car-racing, and also from his girlfriend, Trixie, and the mysterious Racer X.
The feel and look of the movie is clearly inspired by the cartoon as most of the environment is animated in strong candy-coloured and fantasy looking settings that clearly lets us know it is not real. The opening scene also remind us of the cartoon foundations of the story, as Speed Racer’s little brother sits at school drawing cartoons of race cars.
In the movie, all the classic characters as earlier mentioned, are involved. Speed Racer grows up in a family crazy about motors. The tragedy hits them when Speed’s older brother, Rex, dies in a mysterious accident. 8 years later it is Speeds turn to fight for victory in the same race, but he also discovers that the biggest sponsors use dirty methods to win the race.
The story has all the five elements of a plotted story.
1. A believable lead character: Speed Racer
2. His urgent and difficult problem: Royalton Industries who threats him that he will do everything to make sure he doesn’t win the race, and other sponsors who also use dirty tricks to win the race.
3. His attempt to resolve the problem, which fails and make his situation more desperate: Together with Racer X, his girlfriend and Japanese Taejo Togokhan, he competes in Casa Cristo/the Crucible to fight against Royalton and his fellow cheating sponsors, against his father’s wishes.
4. The crisis, his last chance to win, anticlimax: the Grand Prix
5. The successful resolution: wins and becomes friends with his father again.

The story isn’t very original, but the directors make it spectacular by using an extreme use of special effects, animation and creative and spectacular clipping. The race tracks looks more like some kind of rollercoaster, with loops and tracks going up in the loose air, and the cars certainly have a lot of other abilities than normal Mazdas and Hondas, like the ability to jump over other cars, for example. The strong chewing gum looking scenes and objects, together with a sometimes very intense, fast and confusing clipping, makes the movie a bit hard to watch on the eyes sometimes. But it also looks fantastic, and makes it far more interesting by creating these spectacular effects, then it probably would have been without them.

The directors of the movie are the Wachowski-brothers who became very famous for making the action-genre more spectacular and exciting with the animation- and effect-use in the Matrix- trilogy. They’ve also directed “V for Vendetta” a movie that also was based on a cartoon. This movie is also placed in a futuristic society, but has a far less children friendly theme and story, as “Speed Racer”, since it based on dystopic future-visions, where the society is ruled by a totalitary government.
When briefly comparing these three movie-works by the Wachowski-brothers (I put all the movies of the Matrix-trilogy under the same creation-concept), there are a couple of similarities that can be traced in all of them. Especially the fact that all are set in futuristic, artificial environment, and also that they all contain a high level of data generated technique, used especially to create the environment the movie takes place in.

In the conceptualisation face of movie production it is important for the producers to create a special mark of what they are making, something that is unique for the work being made. I think one of the reasons why we watched “Speedracer” was that we could see how movie-makers can find inspiration to make movies from different sources, like books, real life stories, and other movies for example, and like in this movie, cartoons. We watched a clip from the original cartoon and saw how much the producers have transformed it in the process of making it to a movie. By studying some of the previous work of the Wachowski-brothers, we can also see that there are certain characteristics in these works that makes it possible to see that they are made by the same production team.

Sources: www.imdb.com,www.wikipedia.org ,www.speedracer.com ,www.nostalgiacentral.com/tv/kids/speedracer.htm