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About
Animatrix :
The Animatrix
represents an interesting moment in history for both American pop culture
and Japanese animation. While the original film The Matrix and (click) the sequel
took much of its inspiration from anime, The Animatrix brings the cycle full-circle with 9 short
films produced and directed by Japanese animators using The Matrix as a springboard. Some
may interpret this as crass commercialization; after all, when we're having
Matrix cell-phones and Matrix soft-drinks shoved down
our throats, it's natural to dismiss yet another sampling of Andy and Larry
Wachowski's brain-child as a cash-cow waiting to be harvested. When
watching the DVD, however, it's apparent that The Animatrix is far more than a simple attempt at raking in
greenbacks. Not only is The Animatrix a great collection of Japanese
animation, it is also a landmark example of both America's acceptance of Japanese
animation, and of animation as an art form.
The idea for The Animatrix
came about as the result of a promotional tour by Matrix directors Andy and
Larry Wachowski; while in Japan, the Chicago-born Wachowski brothers requested to visit several Japanese
animation studios, as anime and Asian film had been huge influences on The Matrix. In fact, The Matrix had even been pitched
to producer Joel Silver as a 'live action anime', so returning to the
source of their inspiration must have been something of a journey to mecca. The Wachowskis thought
that it might be interesting to approach a number of anime studios for some
sort of collaboration. Pop culture being the recursive oddity that it is, a
number of anime directors whom the Wachowskis
approached were exited by the idea, being big fans of the film which they
themselves had helped to inspire. While a number of options were
considered, including a full-length Matrix
anime, the final result was The Animatrix, a collection of 9 short films, each
directed and produced by a different team. The overall production duties
were handled by anime studio 4c under the watchful eye of software
developer Michael Arias. Featuring such notable names as Shinichiro
Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop),
Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll, Wicked
City), Mahiro Maeda (Blue Submarine No. 6), and Peter
Chung (Aeon Flux), The Animatrix is a veritable
who's-who of Japanese animation. Of course, there's a strong American and
Western influence, as well; the Wachowskis' wrote
a number of the scripts for The Animatrix, and many of the designs (especially
in Mahiro Maeda's Second Renaissance 1 &2) were carried over from
illustrator Geoff Darrow's conceptual and
comic-book work. The end result is a remarkable mixture that represents the
highest-profile collaboration between American and Japanese animation and
film professionals to date. While this would seem to engender
impossibly-high expectations, it's easy to say that The Animatrix handily meets, and
in some way exceeds, those expectations.
Since the The Animatrix
is divided into 9 seperate chapters, it seems
best to review each of them separately. While all 9 work together
exceptionally well as a unified whole, bound as they are by the framework
of the original Matrix
films, they each have their own aesthetic and thematic style. In some ways
this can be compared to the animation anthology Heavy Metal, though without the overarching narrative that
bound that film's discrete segments.
Authors :
Final Flight of the Osiris
Produced by Square Animation, the same group that delivered the ill-fated (click)
Final
Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Final Flight of the Osiris is not only the highest profile
Animatrix short, it's also the one most closely tied to the Matrix films.
If you saw the movie and wondered how exactly the humans uncovered the
machines' plot to drill into Zion, this should answer your
question. Final Flight of the
Osiris follows the desperate efforts of the crew of the Osiris as
they try and outwit an army of Machine sentinels long enough to send a
message to Zion, warning them of their impending doom. Essentially one long
chase scene, Osiris probably has the least interesting story of the lot,
but for sheer visual splendor, it is unparalleled. Of course, anyone who
saw Final Fantasy knows
what to expect, but to see the folks at Square Animation turn their skills
towards The Matrix is a
pleasant surprise. The opening training duel between two crewmembers is
wonderfully erotic (it's a bit off-putting at first until you realize that
this is virtual foreplay), and once they action gets started,
it's a sheer nine-minute rollercoaster ride.
Second Renaissance 1 & 2
This two-part segment directed by Mahiro Maeda (Blue Submarine No. 6) is one-half of the four segments
originally made available at the official Matrix website. Scripted by the Wachowskis, Renaissance
delivers a fascinating, yet wholly depressing, history of the war between
man and machine. This answers most of our questions as to how the world got
to be in such a mess...which is good, since in-depth exposition in the
first two Matrix films has
been in relatively short supply. While it may not sound like much fun to
sit through a 12-minute explanatory sequence, director Maeda handles the
subject matter with such skill that you never really think of it as a
boring history lesson (not that I ever found history boring, really, but nobody
watches anime to learn history). Maeda cleverly incorporates images
co-opted from our sordid past, from military executions during the Vietnam
War to the demonstrations in Tianenmen Square. Perhaps one of Maeda's
greatest achievements with this short is they way he almost makes us feel
bad for the machines. In fact, you almost find yourself siding with
them...the humans come across as malignant, selfish, and short-sighted,
while the machines seemingly only act in self defense. Second Renaissance 1 & 2 are easily among the best of the Animatrix shorts.
Kid's Story
Remember that weird kid in Reloaded
who kept bugging Neo to let him join the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar? The
one who Neo insists 'saved himself'? Well, now you
get to find out what Neo meant by that. Though the story behind Kid's Story
is really pretty simplistic, the real star is the animation. Rendered in a
very unique, pseudo-rotoscoped hand-drawn style, Kid's Story is a very idiosyncratic piece, and really
doesn't look much like traditional anime at all. It gets even better when
the Kid has to elude an army of Agents on his skateboard, and the art takes
on a bizarre, exaggerated appearance...you might even call it
expressionistic, with it's rough outlines and hyper
stylized movement. It looks quite amazing, though. A certain Keanu Reeves
even reprises his role as the messianic Neo for a few short lines, though
it doesn't sound at all like him.
Program
Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Program
(which, like both Second
Renaissance segments, was available online) is perhaps the most
traditional Animatrix
segment, resembling his seminal Ninja
Scroll in more ways than one. Using Cypher's betrayal of the
Nebuchadnezzar's crew in The
Matrix as a jumping-off point, almost the entirety of Program takes place in a training
sim programmed to look like medieval Japan. Two combatants square off
sword-to-sword for the whole sequence, with an interesting twist ending.
While Program isn't
anything special in terms of its look or storyline, it's still a very solid
animated short, delivering a nice punch, both visually and thematically.
Much like Ninja Scroll,
Kawajiri's protagonists leap from rooftop to rooftop, engaging in way
over-the-top swordplay. Once again, not revolutionary, but incredibly fun
to watch.
World Record
World Record, like Kid's Story, is visually very
idiosyncratic. Fans of industrial-band KMFDM will remember the distinctive
illustrations that graced their album covers, featuring high-contrast
monochromatic visuals. World
Record is very similar to this in that its highly stylized
characters and backgrounds are rendered in strong black lines, with a very
limited color palette. The end result is both minimalistic and striking.
Unlike Kid's Story,
however, the plot of World Record
is far more interesting, proving that there's more than one way to breach
the illusion of the Matrix than to take the red pill. The ending is a bit
obtuse, leaving the protagonists' ultimate fate a mystery, but really
that's not the point of the story.
Beyond
Director Koji Morimoto's Beyond
is easily my favorite segment on this disc. Taking the idea of 'glitches'
with in the Matrix (which the Wachowskis use to explain everything from
deja vu to vampires), Morimoto has created a haunted house full of these
glitches. While the obvious application of this idea would to plunge a
character into a house of horrors, Morimoto goes the other way, creating a
space full of odd delights, the kind kids the world over create in their
minds every time they retreat to their favorite childhood hiding places,
whether they be a tree house in the middle of nowhere or (in the case of Beyond) an abandoned house nobody
seems to want to go near. When a teenage girl loses track of her cat, she
finds herself led into such a house by a group of kids who have discovered
that it has some rather odd properties, from suspending gravity to
reversing time. All is well until the Matrix's clean-up crew arrives to
'fix' the anomaly, leaving the children nothing but a sterile emply lot. As
a child, my friends and I used to romp around an abandoned seminary not far
from my childhood home. When I reached adulthood, I drove back there to see
what had happened to the old place, and it had been 'refurbished' into some
sort of adult retreat center. While the new building was certainly more
functional, it didn't have the same magic that made the old one so much fun
to run around in. Of course, only a child could find redeeming value in
abandoned property...adults only see issues of safety and property values.
At any rate, Morimoto (who producer Michael Arias describes elsewhere on
the disc as a 'producer's nightmare' for the length of time it takes him to
work; the 11-minute Beyond
reportedly took two years to make) has created a magical piece of animation
that recalls the fun and joy of childhood.
A Detective Story
A Detective Story brings Shinichiro
Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop)
back to his noir roots as a private gumshoe named Ash is hired to track
down an elusive computer hacker named Trinity. The casting of Trinity as
femme fatale (which she kind of already was, though not in a full-blown
noir as this) is entertaining. The most impressive aspect of Detective Story (which was the
fourth and last Animatrix
short to be made available via the website) is clearly the animation. Though
the character design and style is similar in many ways to Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop, everything in Detective Story is rendered in
grainy black and white, creating the illusion of watching a noir film.
Couple this with some decent Trinity vs. Agent action on a train (complete
with Ms. Carrie Ann Moss as her leather cat suit-wearing alter ego) and
you've got one hell of a segment.
Matriculated
The last Animatrix short is
Peter Chung's Matriculated.
Though Chung's style hasn't changed much since the days when he was
animating Aeon Flux for MTV, the quality of his work has improved
immeasurably. The central thesis of Chung's short is equally fascinating:
the machines have the tables turned on them, when a group of humans
conducts an experiment to subject them to an illusionary world born of the
human mind. A captured robot is fed a consensual virtual reality in an
effort to see if it can be reprogrammed to be helpful, rather than harmful.
It's an interesting idea, and the resulting 17-minute piece (the longest of
the bunch) is a very surreal affair as the machine is forced to jump
through allegorical hoops by its human hosts. The result is a robot that
has feelings for its captors, though the experiment's ultimate success is
questionable. It's odd to see Chung's work a decade after his most famous
creation, the female warrior Aeon Flux, hit the airwaves in the early 90's.
At the time Chung created Aeon
Flux, he maintained that his work was a sort of criticism of
violence in popular culture. It didn't take a trained media critic to
ferret out Chung's approach; his heroine met many an untimely demise in the
original short segments, even once due to an ill-placed thumbtack (a
segment featured on this disc in the bonus content). It's ironic, then,
that most people only remember Flux
as a sexy, kick-ass babe who shot first, and asked questions later (an
image supported by the full-length Aeon
Flux TV series, by which point Chung had seemingly abandoned his
original intentions). Matriculated
then is not quite a media-criticism in the vein of early-Flux, but rather a rumination on
the nature of machine-intelligence...does intelligence necessarily precede
empathy? Matriculated
doesn't give us the answer, but it needn't really do so. Chung would rather
the audience make up its' own mind.
Screenshots :
 
 
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