Saturday 26 January 2013

The Art of 'Redline'

I had quite a lot of optimism about Redline, it's a film about racecar drivers on another planet made by the animation Studio Madhouse. They're the creator of Death Note and Highschool of the Dead, two of my favorite Anime series, and the film appeared to have the random hyperactive story of Gurren Lagann, another one of my favorite Anime series. This would mean that this story has a happy ending in which I declared it my new favorite Animated film of all time for the next month or so before I changed my mind.

This is not what happened though. I originally wanted to watch this film on the strength of its line art being incredibly sharp and the animation being rather smooth. But on closer examination, it happened that it was ruined by the fact that the colouring gave me a headache, its basically the brightest colours you've heard of, against pitch black, and it's always pitch black no matter what the light levels would theoretically be.

This particular review/blog post is not like a typical blog post in which a viewer discusses a film, instead it's me critiquing a specific aspect of the art style of the first 20 minutes because I couldn't watch further than that without feeling ill. It was kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting, everything's the same colours blended together so it seems like there's no focal point to the composition, there probably IS composition in the frames but the fact that the foreground and background are the same colours and just blend together into a blur make it a downright pain to watch. It looks like a crowd of people of varying sizes rather than giving any sense of depth, not a good look for a film about racecars, because it means everything moves around a lot and it's nigh on impossible to understand what's going on.

As mentioned earlier, I like the Anime Gurren Lagann quite a lot, and the opening to Redline was similar to one of the fight scenes from Gurren Lagann, it's random, hyperactive and has strange internal logic. But what Studio Gainax, the animators for Gurren Lagann understand, is that if your story involves randomness, then your presentation of that randomness needs to be absolutely as crystal clear as possible, otherwise it just feels childish and devoid of tact, and Gurren Lagann showed a lot of tact, and this is the Anime where there's a solar system sized pink tank with breasts fighting a creature the size of a galaxy that I'm talking about here. THAT has more tact because it is always clear what's going on in those scenes because everything is clear and distinct.

Now, if this were a professional article that I'd get payed for, I'd be obligated to qualify my opinions on the art and show it to you, but I'm not going to that because if you were to look at the art as screenshots, you would wonder what was so headache inducing about them. It's been said about Redline that every frame could be a wallpaper and that's exactly right, you'd definitely frame them and put them on your wall because they are well drawn, but in motion you get to see them for a split second and that's it, it's a  hard film to critique in screenshots.

Shame really, I like Madhouse, I like their adaptations of Death Note and Highschool of the Dead, they showed much more restraint with their colour palettes there. Death Note for example, used a lot of very subtle tones on account of the plot being very intricate and well crafted, and in Highschool of the Dead they used saturated yet fairly realistic tones despite the fact that the story's about the main characters losing their moral shackles and murdering a load of zombies to stay alive. It's clearly atypical of Madhouse to use this style, which makes me wonder what on Earth happened to them during this film. Must've been watching Yellow Submarine or Dead Leaves, both of which are equally headache inducing to watch.

Whatever, long story short, I can talk an awful lot about colour palettes apparently.