The interesting thing about Speed Racer 2008 being an adaptation is that the fact that the Wachowski sisters are huge weebs probably posed more of a barrier for them than if someone else got hired to make a movie from that license

Like, weebs specifically hate Speed Racer

Most normal Gen X Americans born in the 60s just remember Speed Racer as one of the kitschy little icons of their childhood

If you were actually into anime, you remember it as the show that spawned all of the negative stereotypes of anime you argued with your parents about

The show wasn't actually *that* popular in Japan, it also wasn't objectively all that good, and it became a staple of US Saturday morning cartoons for basically random business reasons where they got the foreign license extremely cheaply

And they made the dub extremely cheaply

Three people play almost all the voices

Corinne Orr (Trixie) is also all the other women, Peter Fernandez (Speed), who was also the writer and director of the dub, was all the men, Jack Grimes played Sparky and the monkey

The dub dialogue is extremely stilted and badly synced to the lip flaps

It's the origin of the "bad dub memes" where someone rattles through this long sentence without any breaths

Fernandez said for each episode they gave him one day to write the script and one day to record

And the animation of the show itself, although it's not that unusual for a series from the 60s, aged pretty badly

Especially since it's a show about racecars

Much of the time the Mach 5 is a completely static cel just moving across a background cel

It's just, it's everything that's supposed to be embarrassing about anime

Back in the 90s your whole ongoing battle was to convince people to watch Evangelion or Ghost in the Shell or whatever by assuring them it was nothing at all like Speed Racer

So while an anime outsider might think that Speed Racer was some kind of natural progression for writer/directors who introduced Ghost in the Shell to a Western audience by ripping it off as a live action movie, it really wasn't, it's the opposite

It was a great act of humility

And that's why it's so inspiring that they didn't fuck with it

The movie is extremely true to the tone of the original Speed Racer, when ANYONE ELSE would've tried to give it at least a little bit of the grim and gritty treatment

The mission statement in the opening scene of the movie, man

Young Speed doodling a racecar crash in the margins of his homework and making it into a flipbook

Transitioning into a (groundbreaking at the time) cel-shaded CGI scene of him racing a handdrawn car on a doodled track

Transitioning to the "real life" present day scene with the lovingly rendered "real" CGI race

What a clear manifesto

"Maybe they were cranking out a hand drawn cartoon at, like, 5 frames per second

And maybe we're the legendary creators of the Matrix working with millions of dollars and the finest computer rendering algorithms known to humankind

But we're all doing the same damn thing"

That's the amazing thing about the movie

In terms of filmmaking it was genuinely as avant-garde and cutting-edge as you can get

But they embraced the cornball childish stuff so completely people seriously just didn't notice

That they really wanted to shed their reputation for pretension and grim and gritty themes after V for Vendetta

But that just meant that when people said "I don't get it" they assumed "I don't get it because you're stupid" not "I don't get it because I'm stupid"

Damn shame