One of the big problems of "look-driven" films occurs when they attempt to impose emotion and meaning onto characters via composition, production design, fx and color grading. The film then works "outside in" instead of "inside out." Instead of seeing actors alive on screen, we become aware of an artist behind-the-scenes manipulating the characters from a distance. The characters then become subservient to the artist's heavy hand and the film becomes lifeless and impenetrable (e.g. Sky Captain, Heaven's Gate).
And yet, let's consider 300 which was heavily look-driven but seemed to work on a cinematic and commercial level. What accounts for its success? Well, if you're Hollywood the answer is Frank Miller. But I think there are some specific factors at work. First, 300 (and Sin City) are told using first person narratives and the films' look echoes this narrative. In other words, the "look" is not simply an imposition, but is a visualization of the narrator's view. In 300, this understanding consciously framed aesthetic decisions. For example, the elephants were made larger than real life, as if to reflect the way memory heightens and exaggerates certain details of an event (see Cinefex #109). Further, we might imagine that the misty diffusion of the film serves as an analog to the hazy and heroic quality of memory. It is likely that a "look," like the protagonist of a film, becomes a means by which we understand and "enter into" a film. It has to be derived from a character's perspective and not imposed from without.
If we use this idea to examine Speed Racer, we can see that the film contains an inherent conflict because its look derives not from Speed's perspective but from the directors.' Much has been made of the film's sincerity. I keep seeing this quote from AICN's Moriarty hitting the blogs—
SPEED RACER is a great piece of pop art, but more than that, it’s a genuine, heartfelt, sincere family film that celebrates exactly what it is that defines a family. And if you’re remotely cynical walking in, you will most likely reject it completely.
Yes, the film does come across as sincere but there are different kinds of sincerity. Speed Racer is a love letter to nostalgia and Christmasy visions of toys and candy. But this is a knowing sincerity, the sincerity of an adult looking back in retrospect. When I watched Speed Racer as a kid, I never thought of the show as being super flat hyperreal anime. In comparison to Bugs Bunny, Speed Racer looked real. The world given to us by the Wachowski brothers does not derive from a child-like insertion into a fantasy, but from an adult's sincere, but nostalgic hindsight. In the film, Speed is made subject to this world, not the opposite way around. In typical film thinking, the look follows the emotions of the lead. Peter Jackson, for example, made the Inn at Bree greenish and "urine-colored" not to describe its physical characteristics, but to express its emotional relationship to the hobbits (see DVD extra for LOTR). In Speed Racer, however, Speed is impotent in his inability to shape the unrelentingly colorful environment around him. This gives the film a flimsy presence making it less like a movie and more like an object, a toy to play with.
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