I think you have all been forced to endure my tirades about the latter installments of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix trilogy. The first film (released in 1998) revolutionized special effects the same way the original Star Wars films did in 1977. Their style and tricks imitated but never duplicated in ingenuity, the Wachowski brothers turned their creative eyes to completing the Matrix legacy; not only the story of Morpheus, Neo and Trinity, but also the mythology surrounding the computer-generated reality in which the film suggests we all live.

By now it is old news that the second two films (Reloaded and Revolutions) failed to impress the way the first did. And how could they? The story element that made the first film irresistible was old news, and it is an unrealistic expectation that two comic book geeks would be able to stun and surprise the world with yet another incredible story that blows our conceptions of reality.

So Reloaded and Revolutions pass into our distant memory, and yet there was one film project that was released during the height of the phenomenon, (namely: during the four-year anticipation between Matrix I and Reloaded) which explored another of the Wachowski Brothers’ loves: anime. This distinct Japanese animation style has developed a tremendous cult following in the United States during the last decade, so it makes perfect sense that a film project featuring some of the world’s most famous animators and directors would come to fruition.

The Animatrix is a full-length feature film made up of nine short films that delve deeper into the fictional world of the Matrix in a surprisingly meaningful and absorbing way.
Whether it be the beautifully conceived Final Flight of the Osiris, (the only non-traditional animation segment of the film) which features state-of-the-art CGI animation to recount the final voyage of the ship Osiris which is mentioned in passing during the Matrix films, or the Second Renaissance Part 1 & II which recount the “history” of the modern world, and fills in the holes for its audience as to how things became the way the are. At times touching, and others purely horrifying, the films have a much more genuine impact on the audience than the later Matrix films had.

Some are meant to be purely informational, providing us with pieces of the history of our civilization, thereby increasing our understanding of the plight of our heroes in Zion, while other segments show “normal” human beings encountering what amounts to programming errors, and our human instinct interpreting these things as “haunted houses” or UFOs…just the sort of thing that we all wonder about during our real lives the Animatrix offers as “proof” of an even greater vast conspiracy to enslave the human mind.

In many ways, the Animatrix takes the next step from the Matrix, giving us a more in-depth view of its universe, but where the later Matrix films trade human emotion for gymnastics, the Animatrix lingers to give us a true human perspective and experience within this computer-generated world, and so for many reasons, could be far more important to the Matrix universe than either Reloaded or Revolutions.
This film is well worth the time it takes

T.