![]() ![]() Trava: Fist Planet: Episode 1 would’ve fit right in on Liquid Television had it come out 10 years earlier. ![]() (Quickest way to tell them apart: Takeshi Koike’s characters tend to wear pants and NOT wear codpieces.) Indeed, his character designs are so heavily influenced by early ’90s MTV mainstay Liquid Television, specifically Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung, that when many see Koike’s work they assume they’re looking at something Peter Chung made. Just as Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s work was heavily influenced by non-Japanese sources, so too is Takeshi Koike’s. With Kawajiri now in his 60s and having considerably slowed his output-I eagerly await his upcoming web animations with the premise of “guy in drag has a sword and kills many ninja”-Koike is the only potential heir apparent to the special Kawajiri throne of anime madness. He’s a longtime veteran of the anime industry, having toiled for many years as an animator at Madhouse under the tutelage/supervision of the incredibly underrated Yoshiaki Kawajiri. In this sense, Takeshi Koike’s ascension is not unlike the various Hollywood movie directors who’ve gotten their start from working on things like commercials and music videos. Redline marks the feature film directorial debut of Takeshi Koike, but he never would have been able to create it had he not first cut his teeth on directing short animations for commercials, Katsuhito Ishii films such as Party 7 and Taste of Tea, and anime anthologies such as The Animatrix. (Predictably, it wasn’t particularly successful in Japan.) As Redline continues to tour the film festival circuit and receive nearly universal praise from the type of English-speaking anime fan who’d attend film festivals in the first place, those of us not in major cities can only wait until the home video release slated for sometime in 2011. It will most likely be the last anime movie made that is primarily hand-drawn animation, and it’s not painstakingly calculated to appeal to the Japanese otaku demographic at the expense of everybody else. I consider myself one of them, which is why it’s that much more crushing that Redline is fated to be an anomaly the last of its kind in more ways than one. There is a small, albeit significant, minority of anime fans out there for whom the feature film Redline encapsulates the spirit of what they wished most anime produced was like. ![]()
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