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.

Kill Bill Vol's I and II - 2003/2004

Kill Bill Vols 1 and II, Quentin Tarantino's exuberant nod to himself, is an example I suppose of what extremely talented artists do when they've got nothing better to do. They play with their paints. But as a nod to himself it's also the first (of what I hope will be a very short list) of his films that qualify as being little more than Quentin Tarantino brand product.

There isn't much plot that's for sure, only motive; and that motive is revenge. Once we get that (and we get that right up front when we're reminded "Revenge is a dish best served cold") there's nothing else to really "figure out". In other words, the film is set up from the outset to be all style and no substance. That seems like a good reason to give this film a pass, unless of course you are of the belief that style is substance. Personally I'm inclined to believe that style indicates the presence of substance somewhere; usually anyway.

When Tarantino's characters wink at the audience (and there's so much winking going on here its as if the films stars have all developed nervous twitches in their eyes) it's a fundamentally different experience than most times you encounter this in a film. His character's are not saying "Get it?" they're saying "Quentin knows exactly what you want to see here and now watch him deliver it in a way that only he can". It's chest thumping by the director with the willing consent of the ensemble cast who no doubt want to be called in to work on the next project.

So it takes a certain generosity of spirit to enjoy Kill Bill because you have to admit up front that QT knows better than you; that he's a master and you are at best the acolyte. If I enjoyed it its not because I'm the Buddha or anything but because, to me, there IS something thrilling about watching someone who really knows what they're doing go about their business.

In the hands of a less visually and culturally astute director, the shortcomings of Kill Bill's script would have made the experience unbearable. Instead, in Tarantino's hands, Kill Bill is like standing in front of a Matisse painting of goldfish. Granted there's not much there to engage the mind from a narrative standpoint, on the other hand if you can't appreciate the tension Matisse has infused his seemingly simplistic composition with or the way the crude, cadmium orange shapes of the goldfish seem to spring to life within the skewed visual world of the bowl then I don't know what to say. Go buy a Thomas Kincaid. Likewise if you are unable to enjoy the exquisitely crafted Japanese Garden scene where The Bride has her showdown with Tokyo crime boss Oh-Ren Ishii then maybe you shouldn't waste any more money on movies period.

There's no point getting into the particulars of the plot because, as I stated up front, there isn't one. No one is going to mistake the Bride for Ripley. Tarantino's female avenger is drawn in the broadest possible strokes so as not to confuse the viewer into thinking there might be something beneath the surface of Kill Bill that isn't there. We don't need to know anything about her except that she's pissed and more than able to rain whoop-ass down upon those who wronged her. Likewise the rest of the cast are given scenes to play and they play them. But the individual scenes in Kill Bill really have more to do with the settings, the lighting and the sly pop culture references reshaped and given new life (the Green Hornet tv show theme playing over the sight of the jet carrying the Bride as it descends upon Tokyo is just one example) then they do with advancing a story. In that sense watching Kill Bill creates the strange feeling of watching a "Making of Kill Bill" documentary.

If there's one grievance I have with Kill Bill it is the oft-stated argument that there was no good reason to split this into two films. Part II isn't a separate act where disparate narrative threads are brought together and finally resolved. It's just more great-looking whoop-ass. And because of this the decision to split the film seems like nothing more than a cash-grab by Mirimax, which, despite their protestations to the contrary, is probably exactly what it was. For that both the film maker and studio deserve a good slap on the wrist.