Speaking of Ken Koike, if some people are not very familiar, his master Kawajiri Yoshiaki should be famous. Kawajiri is well known to European and American audiences for his beautiful manga-style paintings and violent aesthetics, and he pays more attention than Japan. He once said in an interview that his paintings have always been aimed at teenagers. But whether the outright violence and pornographic scenes in its animation are really suitable for teenagers, I laugh without saying a word. But there are many teenagers who are moved by his works, and Ken Koike is one of them.
In his youth, Ken Koike was impressed by the charm of the works of masters such as Kawajiri Yoshiaki and Morimoto Koji, and was also attracted by Jintian's unique performance techniques in "Galaxy Railway 999". When I was in my third year of high school, I rode a motorcycle from my home in Yamagyo Prefecture for 6 hours to Tokyo for an interview at madhouse. Kawajiri looked at Koike's painting and said, it would be too pitiful if he was unsuccessful. In this way, Ken Koike started his practice in madhouse. He first worked as an animator in Kawajiri's "Monster City" and "Midnight's Eye", and then served as the original painting in "Beast Guard Ninja Post" and "Vampire Hunter D". , The battle between the Beast Guard and Teezhai in "Beast Guard", and the final battle at the airport in "D" are all scenes of Koike's paintings, so Koike claims to be a pure disciple of Kawajiri.
Until 2000, when he met Ishii, Koike kept groping and painting everywhere. In addition to their own works, because they like Kazuya Kise, Katsuya Terada, and Mitsuo Iso, they all contributed to the production of "BLOOD". In addition to animation movies, I also went to TV animation production to experience it, because Yamashita Akihiko, who was longing for the character setting, joined the production of "Big Iron Man" and worked as the op and martial arts producer in Dadi Bingtaro's "Moon Shadow Blue" Wait.
In 2000, Koike made a more than one minute promotional video for the game "Magic Woman". After the video was seen by Katsuto Ishii, he immediately invited Koike to make the opening op for his movie "The Seventh Party". As a genius director who straddles both live-action and animated films, Ishii loves Quentin very much, and is an absolute fan of American comics and violent aesthetics. Since then, the cooperation between the two has been out of control. First, he collaborated on the short story collection "Lava Boxing Planet". Subsequently, Koike also produced animation parts for Ishii's live-action films "The Taste of Tea" and "Nelson's First Contact". In 2003, the two and Kimura Daisuke jointly proposed the "redline" project. After 7 years, they brought the audience "redline" in 2010, which is the ultimate hand-painting declaration. The previous cooperation between the two and the painting skills of Koike Ryokawa and Kaneda have paved the way for this film. In the short story collection "Rava Boxing Planet", there is a shadow of "redline". These two came from the "Rava Boxing Planet" studio to make cameos.
As a movie set to be a racing competition in the near future, "redline" can be said to have a basic plot, and the painting is basically against the sky. The plot of this work is briefly about a male protagonist who opened a plug-in since he was a child, and his dream of driving a luxury car and making girl paper has finally come true. In a nutshell, in the near-future time and space, you can throw bullets at each other in racing competitions, and you can also escape to the sea. In short, everything is aimed at hitting the line. Our locomotive hero, JP, met his heart-wrenching goddess, Sonosi, in the yellow line qualifying for the highest red line. JP, who was originally engaged in fake matches with Jiyou Mechanic, changed his previous practice after seeing the goddess and decided to participate in the red line competition with his real self. Eight groups of racers from different planets who were shortlisted for the red line competition came to the robot country to participate in the red line competition. The king of the robot country led the entire army to attack the field in order to avoid the leakage of the country's military secrets during the competition. A car race under the hail of bullets and the attack of biological weapons is about to start. JP, the protagonist of the creed of not using any weapons and only relying on speed to win, will win both the race and the sister paper in such a race. .
This is a story that knows the ending from the beginning, but it is an experiential animation with the slogan of going beyond the limit. What is experiential animation, that is, in a live-action movie, we can never see what it feels like to drive a 35,000-horsepower racing car, but in this animation, the powerful drawing ability allows you to experience a speed that exceeds the limit of human beings. This is a story that makes you exclaim from the beginning to the end even though you know the ending, and every moment is "fuck, fuck, fuck".
Koike's accumulation of many years has been released arbitrarily in this work. As a combination of Kawajiri and Imada, Koike's settings are extremely exaggerated, plus his usual black ink shadows, perspective perspective, exaggerated human body proportions, various imaginative racing settings, giant baby-shaped biological weapons , a human-machine integrated robot, watching this animated film is watching the achievements of Koike accumulated over the years.
The highlight is the yellow line game in the opening 10 minutes and the red line game after 60 minutes. According to Koike, the opening 10-minute yellow line game is to familiarize the audience with the rhythm and scenes of the film, and it is also a segment recommended by Koike himself. The speed beyond the limit of the human body caused JP's facial muscles to twitch and deform, the eye canthus almost cracked, the nostrils and nosebleeds splashed, the detailed description and the powerful frame rate all made this ultimate speed so real and maddening. The racing scenes are also hand-painted as much as possible. Koike said that the films they watched when they were young were not 3DCG, and the mechanics, mechanics, and SF elements still had to be hand-painted powerful and dynamic. The speed and rhythm of the racing scene in this film, the body is stretched with exaggerated lenses in the performance, and the luster on the body also changes accordingly. Koike adopted a method that was contrary to the times, and the background was also drawn on celluloid, so there is no background in this film, and the whole picture is full of motion.
At the climax of the red-line race, the first half of the race seemed to be walking on an unpaved road. In order to achieve a sense of turbulence and speed, the production team specially added smoke production effects to achieve the effect. After adding the smoke, look at the film and feel it again. If the sense of bumpiness and speed is not enough, add another layer of smoke immediately. The practice of continuously adding the smoke layer finally makes the sense of bumps and speed in the first half unobstructed.
In addition, Mr. Ishii's script and Koike's performance can also be said to be perfect partners. Ishii likes to use various abstract expressions when writing the script, such as the sound effect. It is directly stretched in the middle. The abstract expression gives the artist a powerful imagination space, and each scene has the artist's own personality.
The number of paintings in this film exceeds 100,000, and the skilled and willful painters are really willful when they draw. Like the carnival at the end of the game, more than 700 original paintings were drawn in just 10 seconds, and the densely packed characters were all hand-painted without CG special effects. Not only the big scene, but the grandma who sold cigarettes in the cigarette shop was a character created by Koike himself. He wanted to express the feeling of poor service when he went to a foreign language. The original painting of that old grandmother trembling all over was also drawn one by one, it's simple.
The willfulness is not limited here, because JP is very handsome, and JP who drives the racing car is even more handsome, so the production team wanted to find a handsome person to dub JP, so they found Kimura Takuya. Koike also exaggerated that God was shy and dedicated when he dubbed it. With more than 100,000 original paintings, the original expected production time of 3 years has been exceeded again and again. The artists all said that they did not expect such a large amount of work. Ishii himself also sighed, "Madhoues is really good, I will never have the chance to meet such a job again in the future."
(This article has been published on anitama)
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