Before
The Fast and the Furious glamorized the Southern California street racing
culture, Initial D drove through the world of young street racers in Japan.
The original manga so vividly told stories of the racers and their cars that
an animated version was a natural. When Ren Usami, Initial D's director,
appeared at the Big Apple Anime Fest, he was met by a group of fans who were
enthralled by the modified street machines depicted in the series. Every
car in the series is real, Usami said, and the racing is real, too. "These
people have those cars and, especially on weekend nights, they go racing,"
Usami said. "All of these things are real," including the hill descent, on
a real winding road which is only thinly disguised with a made-up name. "When
you go to these places there are a lot of car accidents - you can actually
see towing company advertising signs."
Gearheads
love Initial D for the cars, especially the modified Mitsubishi Evolution.
All of the engine modifications don't win Initial D's street races; lightweight,
good-handling cars have the same sort of performance advantage on the animated
hill descents as the have in the real world, so Usami is looking forward
to some new cars that will be featured in the latest Initial D movie and
a new animated series starting in 2004. While Usami doesn't drive fast in
his own car, which has an ordinary automatic transmission instead of the
anime cars' manual gearboxes, he does have some pointed opinions about American
cars. The suspensions are too soft, he declared, so much that he'd expect
a U.S. auto to roll over on the hairpin turns of Initial D's hills.
Why
do Initial D's race action scenes look so real? Usami brought in a
real street racer, nicknamed the "drift king," to serve as his technical
adviser. In this case, "drifting" refers to the stylized, tire-smoking
burnouts done in Asian street performance cars. Racing action can take a
series only so far; the humans also have to be interesting, and Usami said
Initial D's writers work hard to make sure the characters change with every
show and season. Sometime in Initial D's future, the street-racing drivers
might turn into real racers who compete on the Japanese GT sports car circuit,
Usami hinted.
Before
The Fast and the Furious glamorized the Southern California street racing
culture, Initial D drove through the world of young street racers in Japan.
The original manga so vividly told stories of the racers and their cars that
an animated version was a natural. When Ren Usami, Initial D's director,
appeared at the Big Apple Anime Fest, he was met by a group of fans who were
enthralled by the modified street machines depicted in the series. Every
car in the series is real, Usami said, and the racing is real, too. "These
people have those cars and, especially on weekend nights, they go racing,"
Usami said. "All of these things are real," including the hill descent, on
a real winding road which is only thinly disguised with a made-up name. "When
you go to these places there are a lot of car accidents - you can actually
see towing company advertising signs."
Gearheads
love Initial D for the cars, especially the modified Mitsubishi Evolution.
All of the engine modifications don't win Initial D's street races; lightweight,
good-handling cars have the same sort of performance advantage on the animated
hill descents as the have in the real world, so Usami is looking forward
to some new cars that will be featured in the latest Initial D movie and
a new animated series starting in 2004. While Usami doesn't drive fast in
his own car, which has an ordinary automatic transmission instead of the
anime cars' manual gearboxes, he does have some pointed opinions about American
cars. The suspensions are too soft, he declared, so much that he'd expect
a U.S. auto to roll over on the hairpin turns of Initial D's hills.
Why
do Initial D's race action scenes look so real? Usami brought in a
real street racer, nicknamed the "drift king," to serve as his technical
adviser. In this case, "drifting" refers to the stylized, tire-smoking
burnouts done in Asian street performance cars. Racing action can take a
series only so far; the humans also have to be interesting, and Usami said
Initial D's writers work hard to make sure the characters change with every
show and season. Sometime in Initial D's future, the street-racing drivers
might turn into real racers who compete on the Japanese GT sports car circuit,
Usami hinted.
