Speed Racer

Inspired by the 1960s Japanese-made animated series, the Wachowskis’ enormously fun entertainment integrates live action and kaleidoscopic digital effects to create a highly artificial, color-saturated fantasy world where race cars come equipped with retractable weaponry and battle it out like spinning tops (or “beyblades”). Weaving between past and present with rare finesse, the opening scenes establish that we’re entering a little boy’s daydream. Speed Racer (played as a kid by Nicholas Elia, and subsequently by Emile Hirsch) is struggling with a math equation when his mind begins to wander. As well it might: Pops (John Goodman) designs race cars and older brother Rex drives them — brilliantly. No wonder it’s all Speed can think about.

When Rex perishes in a crash, it’s a foregone conclusion that Speed will follow in his tire tracks. But even as a young man he soon discovers the sports world is more complex than he imagined: He’s schmoozed by the CEO of Royalton (Roger Allam), a big money corporate sponsor. When Speed rejects his offer, Royalton angrily insists the sport is a sham and he’ll never win a race. Although it’s not set in a specific time and place, the environment, the clothes and the language — “Cool beans” — is redolent of the sitcom suburbia that was a product of the Eisenhower years: The Jetsons via Roy Lichtenstein. It is possible to feel nostalgia for a lost utopia, the future we used to believe in that never quite materialized.

The races are dizzying switchback affairs, closer to virtual kung fu than NASCAR. The longest is a cross-country rally/demolition derby which seems indebted to another late ’60s cartoon, The Wacky Racers. It’s a dizzying pop-art confection for speed heads of all ages.

Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of — and look at — movies.

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

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