The project's development started seven years before release; the idea to center the film on a car race came after screenwriter Katsuhito Ishii visited rural America and noticed people were more passionate about tinkering with cars than watching movies.

Director Takeshi Koike was brought onto the project by Ishii and producer Daisuke Kimura with only a loose pitch of a space car race featuring eight racer teams; Koike joined because the vague concept let him freely design the world himself.

Redline was Takeshi Koike's feature directorial debut, and the film took seven years to produce, using over 100,000 hand-drawn frames despite being made in the era of dominant 3DCG animation.

Even before Takuya Kimura was cast, screenwriter Katsuhito Ishii wrote the lead character JP with Kimura specifically in mind, tailoring the script to him.

The voice cast deliberately mixed live-action film actors (like Takuya Kimura, Yū Aoi and Tadanobu Asano) for the main roles with professional anime voice actors for supporting characters, a balance reflecting Ishii's background working in both live-action and animation.

Koike, who also served as animation director, insisted on drawing both characters and backgrounds entirely by hand with a cel-shaded look, using pure black shadows to emulate the visual style of American comic books, going against the industry trend of assigning backgrounds to separate specialist teams.

To evoke an analog, pre-CG aesthetic, the filmmakers packed the movie with gadgets and visual references inspired by 1970s-80s works such as Cannonball Run, Star Wars, Mad Max, and Wacky Races.

A 2003 prelude OVA titled Trava: Fist Planet introduced the characters Trava and Shinkai, who later reappear as key racers in Redline, set ten years before the events of the OVA.

Redline premiered at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival in August 2009, screened for 10,000 spectators on the Piazza Grande, Europe's largest outdoor cinema screen, and later won the Audience Award at the Utopiales sci-fi festival in Nantes, France.

Despite critical acclaim and screenings at over 40 film festivals worldwide, Redline was a box office failure in Japan, grossing only about 100 million yen from roughly 60 theaters, though it found greater success and cult status after its home video release.