For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

I’m so glad Speed Racer is the only cartoon I remember my dad talking about. Being a teenager in the time of the Star Wars prequels was kind of rough, as anything that didn’t meet my lofty expectations was utter garbage. Exhibit A was my reaction to The Matrix sequels–especially Revolutions–where I was disappointed my ideas didn’t pan out in the movies (nothing like a male teen ego!). I wasn’t excited for Speed Racer despite it coming from the Wachowskis, who I thought could still be great filmmakers (I’ve never been more glad to have been proven right). My familiarity with the show was mostly from my dad’s memories of watching the show as a kid and that episode of Dexter’s Laboratory that parodied it. Thanks to dad’s nostalgia, my brother and I went to see Speed Racer in IMAX opening weekend. I mostly remember two things about that experience:the theater was more than half empty, and I walked out feeling absolutely exhausted by the movie.

Watching Speed Racer in 2008 was a truly dizzying experience. I had never seen anything like it before. Sure, the second two Star Wars prequels were mostly digital environments, but here, the Wachowskis embraced the aesthetics of anime, pushed them through a digital environment, and created something entirely new. The compositions mix (and remix) split screen, montage, and digital spaces in ways that are rarely seen outside the realm of animation. In practice, it’s garish, and on a gigantic screen, it made my head spin. Watching for the first time back then, Speed Racer felt like the future. One that never really arrived. 

One of the beautiful things about Speed Racer is that it stands apart from the fetishization of “realism” that dominates the current visual storytelling landscape. I love the movies of Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan as much as anyone, if not more, but that’s not the end-all-be-all. So many superhero movies have drab aesthetics because it’s believed that audiences will buy into it more. Instead, I think it makes the computer-generated elements stand out more. But Speed Racer lampshades that issue by making everything look like it has a shiny candy shell overlaid on top of it. The colors–especially the reds and purples–splash across the screen, embracing elements of manga and anime visual language. But if Speed Racer was a mere visual curiosity, it wouldn’t have made this list.

I personally connect with Speed Racer both because of my dad and my love for motorsports. There is something special about the bond between driver and car,the vehicle and its human pilot are expressing movement together. For the title character, Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) is not just his name but a vocation. From the time he was a child, he was meant to race. Everything makes sense when he is driving a race car. In the world of the movie, the two most important things in life are your calling–what you are meant to be doing–and the people you love. Much of Speed’s arc is about finding the balance between the two and facing the biggest thing getting in the way of that balance: corporate greed. Of course, in the end, E.P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam), the movie’s avatar for capitalism, is jailed, and the Speed family is victorious. This is still a cartoon unreality, after all.

In the scope of the Wachowskis' careers, Speed Racer is less of an outlier than it might appear at first glance. All of their work deals with identity as a primary concern as well as the forces that get in the way of that identity. Here, that identity is largely focused on Speed’s vocation, which makes it even more allegorical than The Matrix series, Cloud Atlas, or Jupiter Ascending, but it is still about the systemic issues that require us to fight for our self-determination. I would put it alongside Josie and the Pussycats, Little Women (2019),  Singin’ in the Rain, and Showing Up as a great example of the struggle of trying to make meaningful art under capitalism. Here, the struggle is wrapped up in a shining and constantly moving package, a bold and beautiful symphony filled with earnest love. Under all of the technology, the vast moving pieces, and the glossy look, the soul of the thing is what matters most.