Speed Racer: Too Much, Too Soon
The Wachowskis made a $120 million anti-corporate acid trip for kids—and we punished them for it. But now? We might finally be ready.
The year is 2008, and Lana and Lilly Wachowski have one goal in mind:
“To assault every single modern aesthetic.”
Those are Lana’s actual words. She and her sister are feeling boxed in by the limits of what movies are allowed to look like. As Lana puts it, when you walk into an art museum, you’re surrounded by hundreds of styles—graphic, pop, abstract, cubist, romantic, naturalistic. But in film? Maybe one movie’s a little greener. Maybe one’s a little grittier. But overall, everything kind of… looks the same. They pushed the boundaries with The Matrix, now they want to go way further. They don’t want to imitate realism. They want to be Picasso. Listen to her describe their intent.
WAS WARNER BROTHERS THE BAD GUY?
“Racing’s not about racing. It’s about control.”
This whole movie is about how corporate systems destroy originality.
The races are fixed. The outcomes are chosen. The system rewards obedience. This Isn’t New for the Wachowskis. Across their work, they keep fighting the same enemy: Institutions that pretend to offer freedom, but actually enforce conformity. The Matrix, is the illusion of choice inside a prison. Cloud Atlas, clones are raised to believe they have purpose—until they’re recycled. Jupiter Ascending, entire planets are just fuel for the rich. They are telling us the monster is in the house. Speed doesn’t win. He beats the system by refusing to be bought.
HOW’D THEY DO THAT?
There are very few production photos from Speed Racer primarily because the entire film was shot on green screen stages at Studio Babelsberg in Germany. There were zero physical locations—even close-ups had digitally inserted backdrops. We dug up some rarer footage and photos to help visualize the process.
Instead of tracking camera movement through real space, the Wachowskis pre-programmed camera paths in CG. It wasn’t live action with VFX added. It was CG with live-action layered in.
They deliberately removed depth cues (like blur) to mimic 2D animation. All background and foreground elements were in crisp focus—so it looked “drawn,” not photographed. Cinematographer David Tattersall worked with digital colorists to paint with light.
Entire races were built as 3D animatics months before filming actors. Actors performed inside pre-rendered worlds, like theater on a moving treadmill. Real cars were mounted on programmable rigs to simulate physics, but everything else was painted in post.
“NINJAS. MORE LIKE NONJAS”
At first glance: it’s comic relief. A gag. A weird tonal detour. But look closer and this scene becomes the key to decoding the whole movie. This isn’t a movie that resembles anime. This is anime. Pops doesn’t punch ninjas with a wink. He punches them because the stakes are real, even if the world is ridiculous.
SPEED RACER ON A SHELF NEAR YOU
Speed Racer costs $120 million to make. Warner Bros. spends another $80 million on marketing, with 53 promotional partners. 5,000 licensed products. Betty Crocker cookie mix? Taco shells? Gushers?? Puma sneakers, or NASCAR’s #43 turned into the Mach 5.
How Speed Racer Won the Race
Speed Racer bombed in 2008. Critics shrugged. Audiences stayed away. But something strange happened in the decade that followed. It didn’t go away. Instead, it quietly built momentum. On Letterboxd. On Tumblr. On Reddit. In VFX forums. In video essays. In animation schools. One high profile essay starts a trend.
“Speed Racer Was Always a Masterpiece” (SLATE, 2013)
Maybe culture caught up to maximalism. Scott Pilgrim and Spider-Verse made exaggeration the new realism and finally people understood what the Wachowski’s were trying to do.
“This film is possibly the first to exhibit total control of every single frame… absolutely nothing is left to chance.”
— Coury Turczyn, PopCult Mag, recounting his appreciation for Speed Racer’s fully-realized aesthetics
Listen to the Full Episode Here
UNSPOOLED RECCOMMENDS
Synecdoche, New York (2008, dir. Charlie Kaufman)
Paprika (2006, dir. Satoshi Kon)
Days of Thunder (1990, dir. Tony Scott)
Scott Pilgrim Vs the World ( 2010 dir. Edgar Wright)
Spiderman into the Spiderverse (2018 dir. Lord and Miller)
PAUL IS IN THE PNW
PORTLAND - JULY 10th - FIRST SHOW SOLD OUT. LATE SHOW ADDED!
VANCOUVER - JULY 12Th - NEW PRICES. GREAT SEATS
Paul is still signing and personalizing my book..Pick Hardcover or Paperback
I loved Speed Racer when I finally saw it (in a big screen double bill with masterpiece anime Redline). Well worth the migraine. Usually, I hate weird CG compositing but here there's no intent to fool us, it would be like criticising a cubist painting of fruit for not being banana-accurate (bananaccurate?).
Saw this opening night at Universal Citywalk IMAX and described it then as someone pouring cotton candy sugar into the projector at the same time as the film. Will go to bat for this movie all day.