“Speed Racer” is finally getting its due.
The 2008 film, written and directed by “The Matrix” visionaries Lana and Lilly Wachowski and based on the beloved late-‘60s Japanese animated series, is one of the boldest and most uncompromised films ever released by a major studio (in this case Warner Bros.) – compelling and audacious, on both a visual and narrative level, that also continues the Wachowskis’ thematic concerns about the dangers of Capitalism and their interest in the essential power of a found family. It was unlike anything that had ever been released and is still unlike anything released since.
“We wanted to experience action that was more of a feeling, we wanted to create paintings in the abstract but imbue them with the emotional narrative that was driving the whole thing,” said Lilly in a new documentary included on the new, must-own 4K Blu-ray (out this week).
“We wanted to detach narrative from time and space,” Lana added.
But at the time that “Speed Racer” was released, it widely dismissed. It wasn’t just underappreciated; it was downright despised. Critics found it a cacophonous eyesore (it currently holds an abysmal 37 on Metacritic). A.O. Scott’s review for the New York Times called it “busy and incoherent.” J. Hoberman in the Village Voice called it “a cathedral of glitz.” David Edelstein, for New York Magazine, sneered that the film was “a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.” The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane referred to “Speed Racer” as “Pop fascism.”
“Yes, the colors are hot, the set design is cool, and the sidekick chimpanzee is cute, but the action sequences – the hyperreal video-game kineticism on which the Wachowskis’ reputation for virtuosity has rested – are chaotic and nonsensical,” Scott wrote. It was a sentiment shared by many.
“Speed Racer” was just as disappointing commercially, collecting just $93.9 million worldwide on a budget of $120 million. Plans for a franchise, including two sequels, were abruptly canceled. (The Wachowskis wouldn’t make another movie for four years, finally returning with the independently produced “Cloud Atlas,” which they directed with German filmmaker Tom Tykwer.)
Over time, though, the response to the movie shifted from mild bemusement (and outright distain) to appreciation, particularly on social media and with a new group of more savvy film fanatics, who praised the film in newsletters and blog posts. If not heralded as an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece, there seemed to at least settle in a consensus that it should be heralded as a risk-taking rulebreaker that still seems as outrageous today as it was in 2008. (Crucially, on Letterboxd, it has a 3.6. The kids are indeed all right.)
“Films, especially in corporate monetized structures, they become these things that roll through these factories and they all start to look alike. ‘Speed Racer’ sticks out like this flower in a gray-scape,” said Lilly in the documentary.
After the 4K remaster premiered at Beyond Fest in Chicago earlier this year (to a rapt, highly attentive audience), “Speed Racer” even made a brief, unlikely return to IMAX theaters last month. Pretty good for a movie Lane in The New Yorker dismissed as “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.”
As the collective attitude towards “Speed Racer” changed, so too did the attitude of its star Emile Hirsch. At the time of “Speed Racer’s” release, he was on the cusp of major superstardom. After the movie failed to meet expectations, there were reports that he got rid of his representation (he now says that this change was unrelated to “Speed Racer’s” box office performance). Over the years, though, he painted a series of illustrations inspired by “Speed Racer” and spoke openly about the film on social media. When the movie played the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, he attended in costume and stopped to take photos with fans. Emile Hirsch is Speed Racer. And Speed Racer is Emile Hirsch.
“Emile is so great in the movie. He’s in this tender space. He’s kind of a boy but kind of cool,” said Lana in the new documentary.
Hirsch had grown up watching “Speed Racer” reruns on Cartoon Network and first got the call about the film while he was shooting Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild,” where he played Chris McCandless, a young man who died tragically in the wilderness.
“I was like, Oh my gosh, this sounds amazing. And I’ve got a beard and I’m skinny, and I’m like hearing this and it couldn’t be more different than ‘Into the Wild,’ which I was shooting right then and there,” Hirsch told TheWrap.
After Hirsch had wrapped “Into the Wild,” he had to prepare for “Speed Racer” auditions. Hirsch had auditioned unsuccessfully for the two “Matrix” sequels (we’re assuming for the role of The Kid, eventually played by Clayton Watson). Hirsch was only 15 or 16 at the time.
“I wasn’t really experienced enough to handle them as filmmakers in a certain sense. I don’t think I quite got the direction in the right way and I was just new to the game,” Hirsch said. But he had just been through the wringer on “Into the Wild,” directed by a filmmaker who also happened to be one of the greatest performers of his generation. This time, he was ready for the Wachowskis.
“I remember really working a lot on the auditions and putting in the time to really figure out exactly what the right tone for the scenes was and whose Speed was. From the beginning, it felt like it went well,” Hirsh said. “It was a series of auditions that culminated in getting the part.”
Hirsch said that at the time he remembered news articles about the worldwide casting call that the producers of “Speed Racer” had put out.
“It wasn’t like they just saw a few people, they saw everyone. And part of me was like, what are the odds I get it, just like numerically, I mean, there’s like 10,000 people submitting? But it worked out and I was beyond excited and thrilled and a little intimidated, even just because of the size of the of the production.”
Did the Wachowskis ever tell Hirsch why they chose him? After all, they had seen thousands of actors, watched hundreds of auditions and yet they picked him. Hirsch said no but that “I’m almost glad they never told me.” Now, he can only guess. “I think that there was just something there, that Speed had a certain set of qualities that I think maybe they felt lined up with me. I don’t know though,” Hirsch said.
Hirsch wasn’t sure how “Speed Racer” was going to look, but he had an idea. “I think due to my own lack of imagination, I just assumed it would be the same dark visual aesthetic as ‘The Matrix.’ I remember thinking, But ‘The Matrix’ is an R-rated movie and this has a kid with a chimpanzee, you can’t make that dark. Weirdly enough, that would be more ridiculous,” said Hirsch.
After the Wachowskis showed him storyboards for the movie, Hirsch remembers thinking, Oh this is completely different. It made him more excited to do the movie, particularly because they were borrowing elements from the “Speed Racer” television series and translating them for the big screen.
To achieve this look, the Wachowskis employed a number of different methods, including extensive use of computer-generated imagery from companies like Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Doman and Sony Pictures Imageworks and shooting the actors individually and then composing them together later in an effort to maintain an image with very little depth; one that could mimic the look of a traditional, “flat” hand-drawn animated series.
“There was a lot of acting in rooms with stuff that wasn’t there and I got used to it pretty quick because they had a lot of storyboards, so I could imagine the world that we were in,” said Hirsch. “Then to see all those scenes that you shot, now with this completely believable wild colorful world, it really made me appreciate just how much the Wachowskis had planned and envisioned it prior.”
When we wondered how Hirsch felt about the movie now – and about how his response to it has maybe changed over the years, Hirsch said that he “always loved the film because I love the Wachowskis.”
“We were obviously all super bummed out when it came out and when it didn’t get the reviews that we thought it should have gotten, or the public wasn’t going to see it, e everyone was sad in a way, because everyone had worked so hard on it,” Hirsch said.
He’s not sure when the reappraisal started to happen, although he cites Film Crit Hulk’s essay as a turning point (it was published in 2015). Slowly, Hirsch realized, the tide was turning.
“It was such an organic thing that was not manufactured. This is just people thinking and deciding for themselves how they felt about a work of art and reassessing it and that, that to me, was cool. Ever since the film came out, every year it gets more and more popular,” Hirsch said.
Six years ago, Hirsch saw the film at the New Beverly, a rep theater that Quentin Tarantino owns in Los Angeles. It was a midnight screening. He remembers that the film was playing well but in the Grand Prix scene, Hirsch said, something else happened.
“I could hear everybody in the theater crying. And this was adults, these are cinephiles. And I could hear the crying, I remember going, Wow, there’s very few movies where I could hear the audience crying at a point in the movie,” Hirsh said. “In that moment it really clicked why it was this timeless classic, because it reconnected people to their that childhood sense of wonder and sense of being able to do anything you put your mind to. I think that it’s that heart that has really created the enduring legacy of Speed Racer. I’m very, very, very grateful to have been in a film that people feel so strongly about.”
Hirsch was originally signed on for three films, but the only thing he knows about the sequel is that Lana told him that he “had to get rock hard abs and put more muscle on.” “I could see him getting a little more muscle, a little more bulk,” said Hirsch.
In some ways, the curvature of acceptance for “Speed Racer” is keeping within the legacy of the animated series, which lived far beyond its brief television run.
“I think it’s a film that followed the fate of the cartoon, where the cartoon came out and it only ran for two seasons, and then it got more and more popular, and became cooler and cooler, to the point where Kurt Cobain had ‘Speed Racer’ stickers on his guitar. It attained a level of cool,” said Hirsch. “And I feel like the movie, even though didn’t do well when it came out, it has continued this journey of picking up where the cartoon left off and became one of these one of these things that’s just cool. There is something to it there that isn’t necessarily marketed, it’s just come naturally. And the audience has naturally got there.”
“Speed Racer” is now available on 4K UHD.
