Film Preview: Speed Racer The Next Generation - The Beginning

Speed Racer was a staple of my childhood, notorious for its mixture of high-octane action, varying animation quality, and pure, unadulterated cheese. It's a classic, and it's now following the tradition of many classics such as Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: it's being remade for a new generation, using new animation technology and new storylines.

I smell a disaster already.

When I received my advance copy of the Lionsgate film intended to kickstart the Nicktoons Friday night animated series, I was extremely reluctant to watch it. I've seen too many of my childhood favorites - both good and bad - utterly butchered by modern remakes. The fully 3D rendered character on the cover, with his Botox lips and big calf eyes, didn't really help my anxiety. If I want a fully 3D animated series, I'll watch ReBoot (now there's a childhood favorite whose remake I'm anticipating eagerly). I'd hoped Speed Racer would at least be preserved in 2D.

I'm not sure if it was fortunate or unfortunate that I got a heaping helping of both: a mixture of jerky, minimalistic 2D animation layered over highly simplified 3D backgrounds and animated environmental objects mapped or painted to mesh with a 2D environment. The entire thing looks like a badly-tweaked Flash tween, character motions twitching from one position to another and pretty obviously using every digital shortcut available to avoid having to actually animate something. It actually looks worse than the original Speed Racer, which is hard to do and really isn't acceptable considering the decades of improvements in animation technology and techniques that separate the two. Here; have a video clip and see for yourself:

About the only thing marking this as sophisticated animation is the fact that it has highlights and shadows, which most older made-for-TV cartoons eschewed due to the time and effort that went into animating and painting anything beyond solid colors. Now technology makes that far easier, but you know, pretty colors just don't cover up bad animation. Unfortunately I can turn on the TV on Saturday morning and see a dozen programs using the same cost-shaving, corner-cutting techniques to churn out quick cardboard shows that can only appeal to someone too young to have any standards beyond action, conflict, and cartoon cheese.

Since this isn't a music review site, I'll keep my thoughts on the painful revamping of the classic Speed Racer theme song to myself, although the opening animation - a mixture of flashing checkered fields and rough pencil sketches of animation that frankly look better than the rest of the film - could induce a seizure. Add in a storyline that seems to have been pieced together from random facts about the original with dialogue apparently written in Swedish and then run through Babelfish and played at 1.5x time to create the English track, and the entire experience was an hour of yawns that I had to force myself to finish. The best part was the robotic monkey. When in doubt, throw in a monkey for humor, and you can't fail.

Even at age 28, I still watch cartoons. I wouldn't miss Pucca for anything; it's a great example of minimalized 2D computer generated animation that does a lot with very little. I think I'll be skipping this, though. Like I said, the series runs Friday nights, Nicktoons, 7p ET, and started on May 2nd; the movie will be out on DVD by May 6th. If you enjoy it, well...everyone has different tastes.

The thought of a live-action version of this terrifies me.