22 years after the release of The Matrix, there’s little that hasn’t been said about the trilogy, the Wachowskis, and the way they shaped cinema for many years to come. What doesn’t get as much attention, though, is a little side project that is a true banquet for Matrix aficionados and a great watch for sci-fi fans. Released in 2003, The Animatrix is a collection of eight animated shorts that expand, bend, and break the concepts that were introduced in the first movie.
As you probably detected throughout The Matrix trilogy, the Wachowski sisters are big fans of anime. The Animatrix brings this art expression front and center, with the Wachowskis handing the world of The Matrix over to a group of talented artists and filmmakers and letting them have fun with it. Much like The Matrix, the results are cool, thought-provoking, and never boring. What follows is a list of every Animatrix short, ranked from not-so-good to best.
8. Beyond
A cat goes missing and its teenage owner goes on a hunt to find it. She ends up in “haunted” house, which is just a Matrix anomaly in which things don’t behave the way they’re supposed to – a glass bottle breaks and unbreaks when falling to the floor, drawings made on the floor appear somewhere else, etc.
This is a cool story to illustrate how, much like every major computer program, the Matrix is not above glitches and bugs. As you would imagine, Agents are sent to correct it as soon as the anomaly is detected. What’s interesting about director and screenwriter Koji Morimoto’s story, however, is that it doesn’t go beyond that. The Agents, who are ruthless figures in the Matrix movies, here are just doing boring day-to-day work to troubleshoot the Matrix. They don't bother to chase the kids who found the anomalies and spent time goofing around with them. Much like ghosts and spirits, these events get dismissed as ludicrous stories we tell each other.
7. Kid’s Story
It’s interesting to revisit this episode because the Kid in it, voiced by Clayton Watson, apparently has a small part in The Matrix Resurrections. (Take that with a grain of salt, as IMDb's cast predicitons are frequently incorrect.) The Kid’s story parallels Neo’s (Keanu Reeves): he’s finding it hard to believe he is in a real world and feels increasingly disconnected to it. That’s when he gets a call from Neo, who tells him his beliefs are right but there’s no time to explain further because agents are coming.
This story is compelling because it provides a little insight into how Neo started saving people from the Matrix after the end of the first film. The animation style is similar to what you’ve seen in Kill Bill and on Linkin Park’s videoclip Breaking the Habit, meaning that it shapes character’s bodies according to the dramatic events of the story, and while that’s not always realistic, it's not much of a problem as it fits in perfectly with the franchise's reality-bending premise.
The “solution” for the Kid’s escape from the Agents' grip is to jump from a building to his death, as perceived by the people around him. The ultimate message, however, is that he was set free from the Matrix, and that he will now join Neo and the rest of the human resistance in Zion. Of course, this ending can be interpreted in several different ways that open up deeper philosophical conversations one can have about what the Matrix truly represents. That said, had The Animatrix been done today, in 2021, Kid’s Story would probably not romanticize suicide this way.
6. World Record
World Record tells the story of a track athlete who, much like the free minds, is able to bend the rules of the Matrix through sheer will. He just doesn’t know it. Hellbent on breaking his own sprinting record, he sustains a severe injury while competing in the Summer Olympics but is able to power through it – and wakes up in his power station pod outside the Matrix as a result.
What’s cool about World Record is that it refers to how we tend to view people with an incredible skill or talent as being almost supernatural. This episode makes us wonder what kind of conversations the Wachowskis and director Takeshi Koike had about all types of individuals - such as star athletes - and how they could be worked into the Matrix worldbuilding alongside the hackers lwe know and love. How we are not getting more stand-alone stories of the Matrix to this day, beats me.
5. A Detective Story
One of the most stylized shorts of the bunch follows a private detective’s search for the hacker Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss). What stands out in A Detective Story is not only its visual style, which is almost entirely devoid of color, but also its homage to old science fiction films like Metropolis and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
This episode also illustrates how sometimes an extraction can go wrong. Like the first Matrix film briefly explored, accepting that "reality" is a computer simulation is a heck of a mind-bending exercise, and not everyone is ready to do it. In the case of Detective Ash (voiced by James Arnold Taylor), he had what it took to exit the Matrix, but Trinity didn’t have time to save him because Agents took over his body. A tragic ending to a film noir protagonist, just like Hollywood taught us.
4. Final Flight of the Osiris
The only fully 3D animated episode wastes a lot of its time being a metaphor for two people getting it on. Considering how 3D animation was more difficult to produce back in the early 2000s, you’d think that director Andrew R. Jones would get to the point more quickly, but hey, we got a tech demo of half-naked 3D models instead. That said, Final Flight of the Osiris is the perfect segue to start The Matrix Reloaded, especially if you are doing a marathon, because it leads directly into the sequel. True, Kid’s Story also has a direct connection with the films, but the events in this short not only tie-in to the franchise's main plot, but set the events of The Matrix Reloaded in motion.
In the story, the members of the ship Osiris discover a whole horde of machines digging their way into Zion, and decide to use the Matrix to inform everyone about it at the cost of their own lives. Before that, however, two members of the crew spend almost half the episode undressing each other in a sexy swordfight. What can we say? It was the early aughts.
3. Program
The only episode heavily inspired by older animem, Program uses the genre's most common tropes to debate the quintessential Matrix dilemma: if you knew you were living on a simulation but the alternative was living in a dystopic and dangerous reality, which one would you choose?
In Program, Duo (voiced by Phil LaMarr) makes Cis (Hedy Buress) believe he chose the former, and that he will betray everyone on the ship to get what he wants. While Cis experiences profound disappointment, the audience is treated to an amazing moonlit samurai swordfight in feudal Japan with impressive scenery, great choreography, and a surprise ending.
2. Matriculated
One of the most frequent metaphors utilized in The Matrix is the story of Alice in Wonderland, specifically the idea of seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. This is what happens in Matriculated, which poses the ultimate existential question: what is real? In the episode, a group of rebels uses a laboratory to experiment on machines. The ultimate experience happens when they decide to plug one captured robot into the Matrix. The result is a psychedelic, abstract scenario that can’t really be put into words.
What can be discussed, however, is one of the biggest questions of the 21st century: to what extent is artificial intelligent really artificial? If a machine is able to interpret situations, react on them, interact with humans and develop emotions, then what separates us from them? What makes humans humans? Don’t expect to find the answers in this short, but you sure will go on a wild ride with it. Too bad it’s not a feature-length film.
1. The Second Renaissance, Parts I & II
This is it. The very fabric of the Matrix. Written by Lana and Lilly Wachowski themselves, this is the episode (or couple of episodes) that explains how the Matrix came to be. Narrated by a deity-like figure credited as The Instructor (Julia Fletcher), the episodes are presented not only as a documentary of humanity’s downfall, but also as a comment on our tendency to create our own demise.
The Second Renaissance shows that as soon as Artificial Intelligence beings started to gain prominence, humans grew frightened and started to find ways to eliminate them, from physical violence to “killing” the skies so that machines wouldn’t be able to draw from solar power.
Much like science fiction itself, The Second Renaissance isn’t scary because of its imagery. It’s scary because over two decades have passed since it was made, and the issues it highlights are still being debated to this day. We may not be fighting over what to do with intelligent androids yet, but we sure are wasting time and effort looking for easy, wrong-headed solutions to problems we created. Hopefully we can band together like the last human city of Zion when the time comes to save ourselves.