Up until this point, I haven’t had a ton of enthusiasm for the upcoming Speed Racer movie. I didn’t really watch the show much when I was younger, and The Wachowski Brothers name alone wasn’t enough to sell me on the project. That said, the cast is shaping up to be quite impressive, and the first photos they released of the Mach 5 car blew me away. Now comes news of some revolutionary new technology that they are using to shoot the film, and I have to admit I’m starting to get pretty psyched to see this thing. In an interview with Collider, Susan Sarandon (who plays Speed’s mom) described the idea behind this new technique they are using:

“They’re doing something where they’re layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon and they’re also doing two dimensional and three dimensional stuff and mixing and everything is very, very saturated with some new kind of film, so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background. So it’s every color that wasn’t in The Matrix is seriously in this film.”

I am assuming the idea is to replicate the look of Japanese animation in a live action setting, so that we’ll have backgrounds sliding around independent of the foregrounds, and the depth of focus will be set up so that it’s not very noticeable. You know, early on when producer Joel Silver said the movie was going to look unlike anything that’s ever been done before, I didn’t really take him seriously. But now it sounds like The Wachowski Brothers are back working on the cutting edge once again, and the results should be quite interesting. Let’s just hope this new effect doesn’t get imitated and run into the ground to the extent that bullet time did in the years following the release of The Matrix.