The Animatrix - 2003

"The Animatrix" is, for my money, the true successor to the Wachowski's uber-influential 1999 hit The Matrix. It carries the spirit of that groundbreaking film forward in a way the two 'official' sequels did not. Comprised of 9 short films created by leading Japanese animators The Animatrix serves to expand upon the ideas, concepts and characters of The Matrix while paying homage to the anime that helped spawn the original movie. After four of its component parts premiered on the internet the entire collection of 9 shorts was released to DVD on June 3, 2003.

The Wachowski's actually had a limited hand in the creation of the Animatrix and that seems to have served to rein in their more pretentious and boring philosophical tendencies, the kind that ran amok in Reloaded and Revolutions. As a result The Animatrix bristles with the kind of tension, mood and belief in the value of asking questions that have no easy answers that made the first Matrix movie such an unexpected and welcome surprise. The Animatrix expands on the original film's question "What is reality?" by delving deeper into the underlying question "What is life?" which is, after all, the question that spawned the human/machine conflict that resulted in the matrix program to begin with.

Each short has its own look and feel (with the exception of "The Second Renaissance" which is basically one film split into two parts) with each Japanese writer/animator/director taking their own stab at the material. Some, like "Final Flight of the Osiris" and "Kids Story", were based on material the Wachowski's had developed previously and lay the groundwork for things to come in Reloaded and Revolutions. The luscious "A Detective Story" (written and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe) can be seen as a direct prequel to The Matrix itself while my personal favorite "Beyond" (written and directed by Koji Morimoto) was created out of whole cloth and follows a group of kids plugged into the matrix who encounter an anomalous region within what they believe to be the real world where the laws of physics seem to break down. "Matriculated" (written and directed by Peter Chung) goes so far as to wonder how humans might react if machines could actually be reprogrammed to see and (more importantly) feel the world the way we do. Would we accept them? Or would it be a case of "you better be careful what you ask for because you might get it"? To the credit of nearly everyone involved the answers are left up to the viewer.

If I have a quibble with The Animatrix it is in the titling of the collection's two "Second Renaissance" pieces. The Renaissance (or 'rebirth') was so named because it represented a rediscovery of long lost stores of knowledge from the period of the Roman Empire that had been squirreled away in abbeys or simply buried (in the cast of classical Roman sculptures) for centuries. The Second Renaissance of The Animatrix is not a rediscovery but the emergence of what may or may not be a new form of life and that possible life form's struggle for recognition. But this is a minor issue to be sure.

On the whole The Animatrix is tremendous achievement. Varied in tone and viewpoint, intellectually engaging, restrained, visually arresting and never boring it's a testament to the imagination and craftsmanship of those involved. The best thing that can be said about the Wachowski's role in it's creation (and this is no small thing) is that, after providing the inspiration, they had the courage to stay out of the way.