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[HanCinema's Film Review] "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race"

In a world not too different than our own, people do not own pets, but rather semi-sentient miniature cars. As "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" is based on a franchise aimed squarely at children, these miniature cars are inevitably used to engage in high stakes tournament style combat showdowns between middle school students. They also do normal middle school student stuff like obsess over romantic crushes.

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That ends up being the main running joke in "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race". Kudos to the production team for being able to maintain a sense of constancy. While "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" is really just three episodes of a TV show taped together, because all of them deal with this same relationship dynamic the tone throughout is surprisingly consistent. The last section even adds a permanent change in character relationships- which I was most definitely not expecting.

On the whole the romantic crush aspect of the story works mainly because it's funny, if well-worn. Sure, she's kind of gross and a little weirdly aggressive, but there's no reasoning with the power of goofy idiot in love tunnelvision. And all the little moments are surprisingly spot on. There's being mad and not explaining why, desperate, obvious attempts to impress the target of this unrequited affection, and of course the constant fear of being teased by friends. Even late advice that comes off as a bit stalkery manages to feel well-intentioned at least.

This silly adolescent love story is broken up, every so often, by mostly generic watchcar battles. They're not terrible- there is a basic logic to the vehicular combat, although it's nothing too impressive. Just find the weakness, recover from the weakness, and then...well I couldn't figure out what was happening the last fight at all, which is to be expected considering it was a massive six way battle that seemed to be structured like a race. It wasn't really all that clear.

In many ways "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" benefits a lot from low expectations. This is a franchise that was rather obviously created for the sole purpose of selling toys. All right, all right, strictly speaking practically all animation is constructed with that purpose in mind, some are just better at hiding it than others. Even so, "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" has no deeper serious life lessons to disguise its more commercial motives.

However, the silly love plot is so well-done that I found myself liking "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" much more than I should have. It accomplishes the rare feat of discussing romantic crushes in a funny way that elementary school students can actually relate to- it's immature without being gross or overbearing. Which incidentally, also manages to be a fairly funny reminder to accompanying adults about how we used to look at romantic crushes back when we were kids. "Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" is about as good as it possibly can be given the limits of its genre, so it's an easy movie to recommend. For watching together with a kid, anyway.

Review by William Schwartz

"Power Battle Watchcar: Blazing Race" is directed by Lee Yeong-joon

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