The Animatrix

Genre: Action/Drama

Format: 9 OVA

Allegiance: Warner Bros.

Director: Morimoto Koji, Watanabe Shinichiro, Peter Chung, Kawajiri Yoshiaki, Maeda Mahiro, Andy Jones, Koike Takeshi

Vintage: 2003

Intelligence Agency Report by: Munky

A collection of nine short films, each with their own story line, writer, director, and animation style. From CG to black and white, this anime offers plenty of fluctuations to suit your animation desires. The shorts are: "The Final Flight of the Osiris," "The Second Renaissance: Parts 1 and 2," "Program," "Detective Story," "Kid's Story," "Beyond," "Matriculated," and "World Record".

Field Agent Report by: Munky

Plot
Characters
Impact
Visual
Audio

8.00
7.75
8.00
8.25
8.00

Overall

8.25

(not an average)

These nine shorts offer a style for everyone. If you liked Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, then "Final Flight of the Osiris" is for you, but with even better CG! If you like the old black and white mysteries, then "Detective Story" is for you. No matter what your fancy is, you're bound to find something that interests you.

While most of the shorts have great animation, a few fall short. "Kid's Story" has great background art, but is lacking on the character animation. The same character style can also be found in "World Record". "Matriculated" and "World Record" were by far the worst episodes out of the nine. The shorts have very little to nothing but the guys in black suits to do with The Matrix.

The Animatrix suffers the most from the length of each episode. If each short had been made into a 30 minute episode, a lot more could've been accomplished and the stories would've been a lot more, to actually being, complete. When the stories leave you hanging and wandering just exactly what's going on, you can't help but gripe. Another thing that is odd with this is the voice-overs. Since a lot of these shorts are done with English voices originally, most episodes are best watched in English, rather than the Japanese option. You can tell this by the exact voiceover fittings with the lip flaps and that the people and their names are nowhere near anything Japanese.

From watching this I came out with one statement that sums everything up. Oh crap, here come those guys in the black suits. I still don't know why they keep showing up, that part seems to have been left out.

Field Agent Report by: The Macaque

Plot
Characters
Impact
Visual
Audio

5.00
6.25
4.00
8.25
4.75

Overall

4.25

(not an average)

For me, this series of short anime segments, represents capitalism at its worst. The OVA was done purely out of the simple reason to gain attention for the last two episodes of The Matrix trilogy. It is the only apparent conlusion that can be drawn, since the 9 OVA's do not add to The Matrix story in any form or way, but only hand out new suggestions to what might actually happen in case The Matrix did exist.

When I saw The Animatrix for the first time, I tried to guess which director had done what. Pointless. Utterly pointless, as it never meant anything. For all I know (and care), the segments could have been directed by Parker and Stone, and still have more relevant content than these commercials. You heard it, commercials. The only "relevant" thing missing from The Animatrix was hidden ads, also known as product placement. Where were all the Nokia images from the movies? Well, you wouldn't expect a commercial to further include ads on products, would you?

The more I try to figure out why anyone went to such great lengths to create an ad for a movie-trilogy, the further away I stray from the core of the issue. In the end it's not about getting more viewers to the see the actual movies. It's all about creating a cool image for the product. So apparently it's hip to dig anime nowadays. Be it this or that, the final verdict stays the same. All of the nine short movies are too short for giving anything more than a feel for various styles of animation, which is exactly what the producers of the movie-thrilogy wanted. Besides, who said a commercial has to have a story? The sole purpose of an commercial is to create a positive feel about the respective product.

I doubt more people went to see the final parts ofThe Matrix, after catching The Animatrix. All of the parts were straight out of the rectum if you ask me, since none of them contained anything more than a simple suggestion to a storyline. A "what if The Matrix existed?" type of question, which was then answered with a small demonstartion of animation skills. The end result is probably one of the most expensive ad campaigns in the history of cinema.