There was a time in my life when I used to force myself to wake up at 6am every weekday, gladly, deliberately. Even though I didn't need to. It was so I could run downstairs, sit on a heater vent, and watch Speed Racer and Star Blazers and Robotech. At the age of 6 I really didn't know that these were imported from Japan or that they'd been recut or whatever. Something about their aesthetic just instantly worked for me, and I'd set an alarm accordingly.

There was something deeper going on, though. These were the first stories I encountered as a child with a serial continuous story where characters died (sometimes brutally - every kid I know who saw Robotech as a child cannot forget when Roy Fokker the hotshot badass of the show died mercilessly and randomly), or met personal tragedy, or had complicated family relations. I remember a single episode of Star Blazers where each crew member has one last chance to say goodbye to a loved one before they go out of range on their spaceship. The whole episode was devoted to this, no space battles. The hero of the show didn't have family left so there was no one to call. For the first time a piece of fiction resonated with me, even though it was just a cartoon. I think it's why I have never considered animation a lesser medium. I liked this stuff a lot more than Star Wars simply because it didn't seem so black and white. It felt like a hint that the world was, as I intuited, a little more complicated than adults made it sound.

Anyway, so the Wachowski brothers are making a Speed Racer movie, admittedly family friendly of all things, and it sounds like they've got it so right. They're even having a real monkey play chim chim. This is the Mach 5 and it's picture perfect...



Read the story about it here.