Before deciding to do this review I asked myself (and several others) if it truly qualified as anime. It isn't anime in the traditional sense of a Japanese cartoon which gets translated and then dropped on the frothing fanboy masses of North America, for one thing. For another, it isn't a TV series or a movie or even an OVA, but rather nine animated shorts linked only loosely by the fact that they all are about The Matrix. So many art styles and storytelling techniques and viewpoints are shown throughout the collection that I even, for a time, wondered if I could shoehorn The Animatrix into my hamham system. But it turns out I can, and I did. Each episode of The Animatrix shows a unique and interesting angle of the original idea; which is, of course, that reality is simply a computer simulation to help superintelligent robots regulate human funkiness. Three of these stories detail the struggle of people in the "real world" working against the machines. Four of them show people inside the Matrix dealing with the areas where their dream world and reality intersect. The final two comprise an in-depth history lesson, detailing all the events that lead up to the Matrix's creation.
Each of the chapters of The Animatrix (except The Second Renaissance Parts I & II) deal with someone's experiences with the Matrix. For those characters who are already on the outside, this usually amounts to combatting the machines in some desperate way. For those on the inside, this usually means coming face-to-face with some side-effect of their false reality and coming to grips with it (or not). Since the amount of time we have with each of these characters is so short, stuff like "character interaction" and "character development" kind of get shrugged aside. And that's okay; the star of the show is the Matrix itself, as it should be. These people are interesting because they're interacting with the Matrix, not because they're necessarily interesting. My two favorite characters ended up being the loser sk8r boi in Kid's Story and the pink-haired raver girl in Beyond. If you've seen Matrix Reloaded, you know who Kid is; he's the guy who had a short exchange of words with Neo in a scene that makes absolutely no sense to people who haven't seen his animated short. Lackluster appearance in live-action aside, the animated version is interesting indeed: we learn that Kid is the first person to be killed in the Matrix yet survive outside of it. Raver girl (her name is Yoko) is pretty much the polar opposite - she follows her cat to a dilapidated house which is infested with glitches and bugs. Of course, to her perception, it means that while there she can fly, and restore shattered bottles to their pristine unbroken form, and generally bask in the wonder of existence. When the bugs get fixed, she's left to wallow in the realization of how mundane and striclty un magical her existence is, without ever learning about the Matrix or its effects. So, each story really stars the Matrix itself as the main character, and the people you see running around goofing off are really just supporting roles. It's a neat effect that keeps the viewer interested without leaning on the crutch of already existing stars (although there's one episode, A Detective Story, which does just that).
Story:
I had already seen the first two Matrix movies before watching The Animatrix and I had a lot of unanswered questions. I hoped that, with nine episodes to get through, some of those open windows would be closed for me. While I found the stories I got interesting enough, I didn't think they really filled in the holes very well. After all, The Animatrix is meant to supplement the movies, correct? Then why not use them to fill in some of the blanks? Example: the episode Program is about a woman who is faced with an impossible choice: return with her traitorous boyfriend who has sold out her crew to the machines to go back to the Matrix, or stick to her guns and get killed for her efforts? This is all well and good, but didn't we see Cypher do that same exact thing already in the first movie? This episode showed me that turncloaks are pretty common on the inside - something I had already guessed at. After all, living on a rusted bucket of a ship wearing itchy clothes and eating snot-gruel doesn't exactly sound like a very endearing lifestyle, even if it is "real." This episode was entertaining and, don't get me wrong, one of the better ones - but it's giving us information we already knew. Another exaple: The Second Renaissance is a two-part episode detailing the origins of the Matrix and the war leading up to it. It's like reading a history book, really, and it is absolutely fascinating. It paints the humans as the bad guys and the machines as the victims. It's all well and good for social commentary, but who are these "Zion archives" for? People in the Matrix don't know it exists, and people outside of it supposedly don't know anything about how it came to be. Morpheus told us they didn't even know what year it was currently, let alone any details about the war. The way the original movie plays out, the original war isn't important; the curent one is. These two episodes basically say the opposite. Entertaining yes, but relevant to the trilogy, not really.
Animation:
Just, like, wow. Okay?
And that's to be expected. After all, you know some of these guys. Final Flight of the Osiris? Yeah, that's Square. If you dig incredible CG animation like The Spirits Within or, heck, even any recent Final Fantasy game, this episode is going to blow your mind. A Detective Story has a gritty film noir style that you just can't quite put your finger on, until someone tells you the Cowboy Bebop guy put it together. If you like the lanky joints and scanty underwear remniscient of Aeon Flux or Reign, you're in luck; that guy has an episode here too, called Matriculated . The most "anime-ish" of all the animation styles is Program, assuming (a) you can define the anime style in one blanket statement and (b) you take into account that it has samurais and katanas and stuff. One of the nice things about the art and animation in The Animatrix is that, since each episode is so short, the animators could focus on the quality of the product and didn't have to worry much about quantity. Each episode just screams "attention to detail", sometimes so loudly that you'll want to pause the action or maybe skip along frame by frame just drinking it all in. I don't give that sixth hamham away very often, so when I do you know it's something really special. I daresay that if I had a seventh, The Animatrix would get that one too.
Culture Shock:
So by normal Culture Shock standards, that's a pretty heavy hit. I pumped the score up a notch or two for two reasons, however. For one, why are you watching The Animatrix if you haven't seen one or more of the movies? (I know that can be flipped back on me as "Why are you watching anime if you don't know Japanese?", and I'd rather drown in my own hypocrisy than answer it, so don't bother trying.) And second, by grace of The Second Renaissance being included on the DVD, even a total m4tr1x n00b could work out the rest of the episodes.
This is the part I usually summarize everything in the paragraphs above, essentially making the whole review except this part meaningless. Instaed, I'll give super brief episode summaries for each of the nine Animatrix shorts, and I'll even put 'em in spoiler text for you just in case.
Final Flight of the Osiris:
*
The crew of the ship "Osiris" discovers the machines are about to attack Zion.
They race to send news of the attack off before being obliterated. This is
after we see the buff black dude and the hot Asian chick get naked.
*
The Second Renaissance Part I: * Some idiot decides to kill his robot butler who, being intelligent, decides he's going to fight back instead of just die. This, of course, leads to a whole big thing and creates a huge rift between man and machine. The machines eventually settle their own nation and destroy the credit rating of manking, and don't let them into the UN. The machines have been playing friendly up to now, all things considered. *
Kid's Story: * A loser high school kid who is confused about his own existence gets tipped off by Morpheus. He tries to escape the agents but, rather than getting his mouth melted off like Neo did, he decides to jump off his school and die. Surprisingly, he manages to "trans-substantiate" and survive outside the Matrix anyway, and live to have a bad cameo in the second movie. * Program: * One of the many cute panty-wearing young woman outside the Matrix is killing time in a computer simulation in which she is a samurai and gets to chop up horsemen. Her boyfriend finds here there and informs her that he's just sold out their whole crew, and that if she doesn't agree to go back to the Matrix with him, she'll end up dead. She decides that the truth is more important and, in the end, finds out this was just a test of her loyalty. An interesting look at how the "fake" world of the Matrix (or even a computer simulation) can be so much more real than the "real" world. * World Record: * A nearly washed-up track star sets a world record at the Olympic games, pushed on by past failures to the point where his muscles explode. Then he pushes himself passed that point, to the point where he actualy becomes aware of the Matrix even though he doesn't have a cell phone or a trench coat. He sets the new world record, but ends up in a wheelchair for his efforts, never able to walk again... or does he? * Beyond: * A cute Japanese girl loses her cat and, while out looking for her, follows some kids to a haunted house. All sorts of unusual and nifty things happen there, but of course the house is just a quirky glitch and some agents show up to ruin everyone's fun. *
Matriculated: * Beats me. There's a psychic monkey and a robot who falls in some kind of weird love with a hot chick... and it's really colorful. It might make more sense while high. *
Overall Rating:
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Scene from "Mr. Monopolybot Goes to Washington."
"Late night on IRC" or, "Brickroad; self-portrait."
The man in black eats the souls of the damned, but his horse prefers oats and
carrots.
They shared a pan of Aunt Bertha's laxative brownies, and then...
...and
they
had a pan of the
other
special brownies.
