"And the other thing they wanted to do was find little tricks that harken back to anime. And so we have this effect of leaving incredibly long dust trails. So the idea was to recreate the hard edged, beautifully animated look of cloud forms and so I thought it would be cool to apply a fluid simulation and get a very realistic, very dense cloud of dust being kicked up by the cars, and, of course, as they're flipping over and doing all of their car fu, that they would be passing through these things and affecting them and stirring them up more. To me, it seemed like the idea was to get as much realism as possible at a certain level so you could depart from it even further, like the saturation of the colors. Also, with the fluid sim, we could treat it in the comp in terms of the colors, density and contrast to be a little more like that hard-edged, ink and paint anime approach to smoke. They only specified a look up table for them to reference. We did a multi-plane exaggeration through the manipulation of the bubbles."

For John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, Speed Racer was a little outside of his normal comfort level, so he really didn't mind only playing a minor role after Libreri and Leo moved over to Digital Domain. Knoll supervised a single action sequence involving Racer X and the Cruncher Block truck.

"We used assets that mostly only played in our sequence with the exception of the Racer X car from Digital Domain," Knoll recalls. But the truck and environments only had to work within our sequence. It was one of the few nighttime scenes on a lonely highway as we are introduced to Racer X in his encounter with the Cruncher Block truck. There's all this talk about going for a hyper-real anime look. It's not supposed to look like photography. But it's hard to define what that really means. There was a little concern going into it about an unlimited space to explore, and you've got to get it done for a deadline. But it actually worked out pretty smoothly. It meant that a lot of the instincts that I usually rely on when I'm looking at shots and deciding where I want to go with them didn't really apply. Things like: if you were really shooting this, what kind of camera mount would it be? What that mean about the style of the framing? What would the vibration be on this? With the helicopter move, they're probably on a long lens and probably can't get too close to it. You're going to drift around a little bit. Also, photographically, if this was two vehicles on a lonely highway at night, it would pretty much be entirely lit by headlights. But if you were doing anime, you would draw it so you could still see things.

"I just tried to get into the spirit of what anime is. But you still have to tie it to some live action because we had tapes of characters in the cockpits of their vehicles, and had to match the photography. The general problem was there would be a realism gradient, for lack of a better term, where things would be photographed right around the camera, and, as you got farther off into the distance, it's OK to be more and more stylized. For example, on this lonely highway that we are traveling down, the trees are all textures on cards. They're pretty much the same tree over and over again. Normally, you'd try to mix it up and give it a nice organic look, but we kept being told to go more for that 'repeato tree thing.' So we made them a little more regularly spaced. In anime, you're always fighting with how much work it is to do a completely organic environment like that, so you end up with repeated cycles. We were trying to inject that animated cycle thing into this.

"We kept hearing: 'You don't have to have things move correctly in perspective.' In a side shot you can have strolling layers often done in anime. It is an interesting experiment and was fun to do. And in the end, we came up with a stylized look for our sequence that I thought was pleasing, anyway. I had a very small crew and we were experimenting with a little different workflow from [the assembly line approach that] we normally do. Almost everyone did two or three steps along the pipe and I got some really good feedback from the artists."

In refashioning "sample cinema" methodologies, Gaeta ultimately hopes that Speed Racer will be remembered as a genuine creative exploration and not as much as a technological one. "Dan and I were able to attack any problem from either side of the brain with such a talented team. They were simply the most talented, experienced, well-rounded and fastest I've ever worked with. That was truly the main reason we were able to create an end to end approach, nearly touching every frame in the movie. The visual effect centerpiece was creating the movie itself within [this new Photo Anime] format."

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.