Redline (2009)

Some films exist purely to make your jaw drop, and Redline is one of them. Within about thirty seconds of the opening sequence, I knew I wasn't watching something that was trying to say anything particularly profound. I was watching something that wanted to grab me by the collar, shove me into the passenger seat, and not let go for the next two hours. And honestly? Fair enough. It earns that ambition almost entirely.

The art style alone is worth the price of admission. This is 100% traditional hand-drawn animation, and the sheer labour of love behind every frame is staggering. It has that rich, dense, retro-futuristic look that takes you straight back to the golden era of Japanese anime. Think Akira, think Ghost in the Shell, think Cowboy Bebop. There's a nostalgic warmth baked into the colour palette even when the screen is full of fire and carnage, which it very often is. I've seen a lot of animated films, everything from the gentle beauty of Howl's Moving Castle to hand-crafted oddities like Kirikou and the Wild Beasts, and the range of what animation can do never stops surprising me. Redline sits at the most maximalist end of that spectrum, and it wears that proudly.

The premise is gloriously daft. The galaxy's most dangerous and deranged racers converge for an illegal, death-defying interstellar race across a militarised alien planet, with weapons, explosions, and sheer bloody-mindedness substituting for anything resembling safety regulations. If that description reminds you of the Podrace from The Phantom Menace, you're not wrong. It felt exactly like that to me, except stretched out into a full feature and cranked to about eleven times the intensity. Neon-lit cars, volcanic tracks, zero-gravity stretches, alien spectators going absolutely mental in the stands. It's chaotic and loud and gloriously over-the-top, and for a good stretch of its runtime it's genuinely thrilling.

Where it stumbles, and I'll be honest about this, is that it does start to go a little "samey" as the race wears on. Event after event, explosion after explosion, there's a rhythm to the madness that becomes slightly predictable even within its own chaos. The characters don't help much on that front. You've got your fearless, loveable rogue hero, your mysterious and beautiful femme fatale, your cackling mad scientist type. They're fun, and the humour lands often enough to keep the mood light, but nobody here is going to haunt you afterwards. This is not a film asking big questions about what it means to be alive.

But here's the thing: it doesn't need to be. Redline knows exactly what it is. It's a high-octane joyride built for people who love kinetic animation and absolutely unhinged action sequences, and it delivers those things with real craft and genuine passion. The thin plot is forgivable precisely because the film is just about short enough to avoid total burnout. It gets in, it does its thing, it gets out.

If you grew up on 90s anime, if those aesthetics are wired into your brain as a kind of comfort food, this will hit you right in the nostalgia berries. There's a warmth to it beneath all the noise, the sense of a team of animators who absolutely loved what they were making and wanted every single frame to feel alive. That counts for a lot.

Three and a half stars. A cult classic with engines, and no apologies for it.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2009  | Watched: 2025-11-13

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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Related on Movies With Macca

More with Takuya Kimura: Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)