Opinion: what's the best car-themed anime?

In the same way that Hollywood occasionally conspires to make two entirely separate movies about volcanoes or killer meteorites within months of each other, there’s been a recent, modest trend for Japanese-themed racing games.

There’s Forza Horizon 6, obviously, which takes place in a compressed version of real world Japan, and is a mostly earnest attempt to represent the country’s unique car culture but does also feature a race against an enormous robot.

Then there’s Screamer, which takes clear inspiration from classic Japanese animation, known as ‘anime’, to create a futuristic, sci-fi world for you to scythe through at 170mph.

Both of those games owe a debt to anime’s longstanding love affair with cars and racing. The most famous example is, of course, the 1998 adaptation of Initial D, which starred a preternaturally talented tofu delivery driver and cemented the Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 as an icon.

There’s also my personal favourite, 2009 cult movie Redline: a futuristic, intergalactic take on motorsport that is beautiful, spectacular and hilarious in equal measure. Even if you never listen to another word I say, fire Redline up on as large a screen as you can find and prepare to have your brain blasted clear out of the rear of your cranium.

Being a sucker for a theme, I thought I’d seek out some newer car-related anime as a side dish to the games I’d been playing. First up was a series called Overtake!, which is a charming and surprisingly authentic story about the fortunes of a struggling Formula 4 team.

It’s more about the characters than the cars, but the racing action is refreshingly free of the usual unrealistic nonsense like 18-speed gearboxes you get in other racing media. No offence, Fast and Furious.

Of course, if unrealistic nonsense is exactly what you’re after, Highspeed Etoile imagines a sci-fi racing series where drivers compete with AI assistance in sleek futuristic prototypes. Highspeed Etoile’s vision for motorsport includes fantastically elaborate race suits, helmets with cat ears on them, and a boost that is activated by pulling the trigger on a pistol grip. Hopefully F1 is taking notes...

Finally, there’s the series MF Ghost, which is a modern sequel to Initial D from that series’ creator Shuichi Shegeno. It imagines a not too distant future where self-driving EVs flood the streets, but supercars with combustion engines are kept alive by street racers. We can but hope.

If all this has made you anime-curious, the place to find most of this stuff is a service called CrunchyRoll, which is entirely dedicated to East Asian animation and has over 20 million subscribers.

It’s basically Netflix but for people who think it’s acceptable to still watch cartoons as a grown up. And before the anime fans all rise up to stab me with their plastic replica katanas, I’m allowed to say that, because as someone who literally plays video games for a living, I know a thing or two about shirking the responsibilities of adulthood...

Pictured: Acura's 'Type S' anime series