Speed Racer looks to anime to break new ground in digital cinema. The film contains more than 2,000 vfx shots, including this thrilling racing sequence that shows car flips. All images courtesy of Warner Bros.

A lot has changed since the Wachowskis redefined the cultural landscape with The Matrix back in 1999: raising the stylistic bar with their imaginative brand of next-gen, futuristic retro storytelling. Movies and videogames have been trying to catch up and surpass it ever since. But after a string of stunning cinematic successors, ranging from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City and 300, the Wachowskis and their collaborators have now taken next-gen to the next level with Speed Racer (May 9 from Warner Bros.).

Once again, the Wachowskis look to the past -- in this case anime -- to break new ground with digital cinema, which is where the future of movies is headed. And in Speed Racer, which contains more than 2,000 vfx shots from nearly a dozen studios, they have literally found the perfect vehicle to explore the power of idealistic virtue and artistic freedom through the essence of anime. From the opening images of racing car drawings in a flipbook, the metaphor of Eadweard Muybridge's objects in motion is conveyed through a number of references right on through "Bullet Time" and beyond (with zebras, no less). But with Speed Racer, we have a whole new convergence of escapist interactive thrills where anything is possible.

"They were in a frame of mind to re-imagine something that influenced them as young people," recalls John Gaeta, who, with Dan Glass, spearheaded the internal vfx production effort with many of their previous collaborators from The Matrix trilogy. "As we now know, they are appreciators of anime. And like late baby boomers or Gen-Xers, Speed Racer was one of the first animes to land and grab people's attention [back in the '60s]. Really, when you look back at that cartoon and its production values, it's very simplistic animation -- more so than most. But you don't remember it that way. It reminds me of Narnia in that it has a different energy and magic reading it as an adult as opposed to reading it as a child. If you do look at the story threads, they are quite edgy, and there's a lot going on concerning the relationships and obstacles in terms of the family against all purveyors of fixed racing and corporate espionage. The first conversation had to do with the story of the family against all odds, and then a good action subtext for them to glitterize and modernize and Wachowskiize in the way that they would love to see cars today."

Gaeta, like the Wachowskis, is a pop culture sponge and a visual innovator, who often talks in code as a way of conveying design ideas: "Poptimistic," "Techno Color," "Photo Anime," "Faux Lens," "Virtual Cinema," "Car Fu." In fact, he describes Speed Racer as "Sin City mashed against Matrix techniques pushed through a Pop Art, live-action anime format and wrapped in a genuinely cool narrative."

On behalf of the directors, Gaeta initially oversaw the goals, design and content objectives for the Speed Racer previs team, while in parallel Glass pushed into the innovative HD production pipeline (arguably the most advanced ever). "We also talked about our frames of mind collectively today with regard to cinema and format and texture. Speed Racer expands on what they began with The Matrix trilogy in terms of 2.5D moviemaking and even what we've seen with such next-gen successors as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City and 300, which hadn't come out yet [when we started Speed Racer]. But Sin City caught my eye in its attitude and approach toward the realization of a graphic novel, which I thought was a very free creative approach that [Robert] Rodriguez had taken. I definitely thought that he was actually on to something with regard to [presenting a hyper-reality]. But you'll find in interviews that Rodriguez was influenced by the first Matrix to some degree. Sin City was approached from a very storyboard heavy, comic book style form of photography. And, of course, The Matrix was derived from Japanese anime.