Initial D 1-4
I quite like cars, and coupled with both the recent release of Redline and my own acquisition of a fairly sporty vehicle, I thought I'd give another anime about racing a try. So far it's proving... interesting. Initial D follows the exploits of Takumi Fujiwara, who from what I've been able to gather is some kind of retard. A brilliant driver with an amazing car who somehow doesn't recognise either of those things, even when his friends Itsuki and Koichiro
talk about nothing else but racing and cars. Not only this, but they all work in a garage. Oh, and his dad used to be the best racer in the area.
Clueless Takumi is uninterested in racing either for himself or to help his friends (or he's just completely oblivious to the fact they could even use his help, which seems plausible) he can however be persuaded to race by his father with the promise he'll pay for a full tank of petrol so he can take his potential love interest (who is either some kind of teenage prostitute or has a very inappropriate father) to the beach. Oddly this plot point has become more relevant with time, as that's probably the equivalent of rewarding him with about £400 vs the £80 it would have cost him to fill up in 1998.
The same cannot be said for the CGI.
Oh God, the CGI. For a show that's all about racing, the 3D car models, devoid of lighting effects or even doors, move in such an unnatural way that it never actually looks like they're going very fast. Worse still is the fact that you're taunted with traditionally animated close-ups of the cars making it hard to think of anything other than how much better this could have looked if it had
all been animated this way.
And if the CGI is so dated as to be off-putting on it's own, what happens when 2D and 3D collide is truly horrifying:
Yes, if the 3D models look like they're straight out of Gran Turismo 2, then any 2D areas of the image like dashboards, spectators and occasionally even the drivers themselves look like graphics which wouldn't be out of place on the SNES. Rather than animating these areas separately and layering them on top of the CGI, it seems they chose to draw them as flat images within in the 3D engine. With results which can only be described as abysmal.
What can I say about Initial D at this stage? I wish it was better. I really, really wish it was better.