Initial D (ScreenDaily Review)

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Initial D (Taumanchi D)

Lee Marshall in Venice 15 September 2005

Dirs: Andrew Lau, Alan Mak. HK. 2005. 107mins.

After the Infernal Affairs trilogy, directing duo Andrew Lau and Alan Mak seem to have the Midas touch. This year’s summer blockbuster in Hong Kong, Initial D nudged a $5m gross at home – more than War Of The Worlds and Batman Begins put together.

Loosely working from Shiuchi Shigeno’s popular Japanese manga comic book series about a teen downhill racer, the film combines stirring, techno-cool car racing footage with a comic lightness of touch.

It also bears witness to the increasingly market-smart pan-Asian thrust of recent big-budget Hong Kong productions: with Taiwanese pop phenomenon Jay Chou taking the lead in his cinema debut, Japanese star Anne Suzuki (who voiced Ray Steam in Steamboy) providing the love interest, and a bunch of Hong Kong supporting actors pretending to be Japanese street kids, the film has an eye on the whole Far Eastern catchment area.

The strategy seems to have paid off handsomely so far, with an ongoing $23m added to the film’s Hong Kong gross in the rest of Asia. Manga fans out West will lap it up, but the film is such an enjoyable breeze that it could well go beyond this niche sector to become a cult hit if distributors find a way of marketing it to the subtitle-allergic youth market.

Initial D demonstrates that it’s not necessary to reproduce the style of a comic book, Sin-City-style, to capture its spirit. The filmmakers have gone for a digitally-enhanced videogame look, and replaced the Eurobeat soundtrack of the Japanese manga TV series that first adapted Shigeno’s books with harder, more streetwise Asian hip-hop.

The car action mixes crane shots of the hairpin bends of Mount Akina, where the downhill challenges take place, with close-to-the-tarmac shots of burning rubber and kerbs just millimetres away from skidding tyres. The CG background comes to the fore occasionally in animated sequences where the road is reduced to white lines on black, like a deejay stripping a melody back to the drum and bass.

But the most persuasive and enjoyable aspect of this adaptation is the laid-back, tongue-in-cheek attitude that is maintained throughout – a refreshing change from the hormonal teen intensity that usual marks the illegal-car-race genre.

Some of this laid-back cool is inherent in the character of Takumi (Chou), a reluctant racer who begins notching up crazy times in his father’s anonymous Toyota AE86, letting his back tyres “drift” (the Initial D of the title) around corners without losing acceleration, simply because he’s anxious to get back as soon as possible from late-night tofu deliveries on Mount Akina.

Takumi is a cool jerk, sleepwalking through life with a half-open, fly-catching mouth. He’s passive in love (with schoolfriend Natsuki, played by Suzuki) and in his relationship with his abusive, drunken father (a hammed-up satirical turn from Infernal Affairs star Anthony Wong).

Takumi’s gradual realisation that he’s actually a pretty good driver – and that the car he’s driving conceals a powerful, modified engine tuned lovingly by his dad, a former racer – is the plot spring that unwinds slowly through the course of the film.

Supporting roles are taken by Edison Chen as Takumi’s main racing rival and Edison Chen – playing 15 years younger – as Takumi’s terminally uncool, slapstick-prone best friend Itsuki.

The film plumbs deeper emotions only occasionally, sketching in but failing to develop an argument about over-demanding fathers (the bane of Takumi and Itsuki’s lives) and absentee mothers, and making the character of Natsuki too much of a mere catalyst for Takumi’s anger towards the end of the film.

But this is probably a consequence of Initial D’s carefree take on teen angst. This is a film, after all, in which two rival teen racers share a Pepsi after a fight to the death.

Production companies
Basic Pictures
Media Asia Films
Sil-Metropole Organisation

Hong Kong distribution
Media Asia

International sales
Media Asia Distribution

Executive producer
Andrew Lau

Producers
John Chong
Yang Ying

Screenplay
Felix Chong
from the manga by Shuichi Shigeno

Cinematography
Andrew Lau
Lai Yiu Fai
Ng Man Ching

Production design
Silver Cheung

Editor
Wong Hoi

Music
Chan Kwong Wing

Main cast
Jay Chou
Anne Suzuki
Edison Chen
Anthony Wong
Shawn Yue
Chapman To