Tailenders: Catching Up

I have to pity Tailenders. It’s one of those perfectly decent, subtly fascinating creations that was abruptly buried and forgotten due to superior competition. Here that competition was Redline, Takeshi Koike’s brilliantly detailed and lovingly animated slice of futuristic racing cinema; it remains a marvelous film, and there’s nothing I’d change in my ancient review. Released around the same time, Redline immediately overshadowed Tailenders, and with good reason. Tailenders is merely an anime short with nowhere near the promotion or impact, and yet it’s almost more intriguing in its tale of sci-fi speed demons.

 

Shiro Tomoe is a wreck across the board. His latest race on the planet Terulus shattered his vehicle, his body, and seemingly his ambitions. As he lies on the operating table, a purple-haired woman named Tomoe Miyagura barges in, climbs atop him, and jams an experimental engine into his heart. She’s a mad scientist with a proposition: she’ll build him into a high-velocity cyborg if he’ll aid her research.

The two bond not so much over their common names but over the fact that they’re both out to win the planet’s next big race. She wants to blow up a troublesome terraformer, and he wants to surpass the legendary Loser King, a racer who apparently attained such great speeds that he vanished into a dimension beyond all time. 

There’s precious little room for Tailenders to do much. Running under half an hour, it barely manages to introduce Tomoe (the Shiro guy) and Tomoe (the scientist) before dropping them into a vicious race, one where they're seeking not so much the finish line but rather the bizarre immortality of Loser King. Some supporting characters and fellow racers drop in and out, but there’s really room only for our two protagonists and Shiro’s similarly remodeled rival Goodspeed. Oh, and there’s a short clash with a rollerblading dinosaur who’d be straight out of a 1990 kids’ yogurt commercial if he wasn’t rendered in the weighty lines and comic-book style of Tailenders.

Yes, Tailenders is all about visual punch. The heavy shading and muted colors make for a tight atmosphere, and the animation’s generally sharp aside from a few dashes of unwieldly computer graphics. Backed by a heavy soundtrack and bombastic acting, it captures a slick yet grimy tone similar to Hiroyuki Imaishi and Studio Trigger’s flourishes. It suits a story about thrillseekers overwhelmed by their single-minded goals in a world where even a clear sky seems a little ominous. 

To be fair, Tailenders isn't entirely stuck on the surface. The world of Terulus is more than a raceway, as it's dominated by malfunctioning terraformers and moving cities that keep humanity constantly on edge. It’s technically science fiction, but Tailenders cares nothing for labcoat concepts of relativity and physics. Tomoe and Shiro and Goodspeed are all chasing a warped enlightenment in the form of Loser King, and their encounter with him, a scarred apparition stuck in a silent temporal purgatory, is fascinating and absurd. Like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer film, Tailenders is a glitzy rush that’s primarily about the appeal of a glitzy rush, but here the stakes are higher and stranger.

 

It would, of course, be more compelling if the characters could develop. Shiro’s just all about racing, so Tomoe is the only one who pushes things into interesting turf. Giving off the same scheming, callous energy as Haruko from FLCL, she has a playful curiosity more relatable than the competitive machismo of Shiro, Goodspeed, and other racers who only want to go fast. There’s a mere hint of romantic tension between her and Shiro, and yet it’s another piece of Tailenders that made me want more. 

I should clarify that I didn’t want more of Tailenders in the form of a sequel. I wanted an expanded version of the same story, broadening and exploring the history of Terulus, the origins of Loser King, and the manipulative symbiosis between Shiro and Tomoe. It’s easy to cast Tailenders as a descendant of the brief, eye-catching OVAs of the 1980s and early 1990s, but even those usually ran longer than this. Tailenders sometimes feels like an extended trailer for a full-length movie or six-part series.

   

Nowhere are Tailenders’ derailed ambitions more apparent than its website, still up after all these years. The cast list shows off dozens of vehicles and their drivers: a cage-wearing goth, a helmeted pizza deliveryman, a tree mutant growing out of a zombie, a simple barber, a cyclops alien, and a mechanical mouse soldier who dries a giant toy train in a circular track, just to name a few. 

Most of them put in only the briefest appearances in the animation. Tailenders was part of the Anime Innovation Tokyo project, and I have no doubt that it was envisioned as a much larger deal, perhaps as a TV series or a video game in the tradition of F-Zero. Too bad we’ll never see more of racers like Kyle Triton, the dolphin guy.

If Tailenders was a pitch for something larger, it didn’t work out. It made the rounds and got some attention, but there’s only so much that a 27-minute anime can do without some major backing. It’s not hard to find Tailenders these days so long as you add “anime” to the title in your search, but like so many snippets of the OVA boom and the modern anime industry, it’s forgotten apart from the occasional recommendation by a weirdo fan. 

Well, I’ll be that weirdo fan this time. Tailenders is still enjoyable, with a vibrant look and fun pace that makes me ponder its hints of meaning and leaves me wishing there was more to it all. It’s worth a watch and deserves mention if you dive into Redline, track the varied offspring of Speed Racer, or examine the surprisingly broad influence that Wacky Races had on Japan’s pop culture. It may not surpass the best of its competition, but if there’s a lesson in Tailenders, it’s that coming in first doesn’t matter. We all find our own finish lines.