The Animatrix

This review is for Beyond.

From a Matrix fan's point of view, I feel it's one of the weaker pieces of the collection. It wouldn't be able to really stand well on its own because there's not enough substance. However, in tandem with the rest of the shorts, I think it gives an interesting view into how the Matrix affects "normal" people's lives. It displays the extent of the Agents' and Machines' control over even the most seemingly innocuous areas of the system.

The art and animation were done quite well by Koji Morimoto, who did the art direction for Akira. The characters were a bit ... generic, but they're not really meant to be the main focus of the piece, in my opinion. It's more of a look at the Matrix itself and how it shapes the lives of its inhabitants. You could've inserted different characters and still had the same story, basically. The ending of this piece is what really makes it worthwhile to watch for me. There's a sense of loss that colors it that is made more striking because of the difference in mood from the beginning of it.

It’s rather hard to talk about a show like this because it’s mostly like a range of different episodes. They may all contain the Matrix like style but there really isn’t much that connects them. From the story to the animation, each part is different and told in its own way. The movie gets more and more confusing as the stories keep going, making it hard to get what is going on. There isn’t an indication of if you are inside the Matrix or outside it. All I could understand was how pretty the animations were at points and how ‘crappy’ they were in others. ... The whole mix of samurai to space age, to computer simulations that look so real that it could be live action, all of that just seemed a little overboard.

Question, why does it start out with a man and women undressing each other with katanas? Is it just for sexual looks or is there actually a reason for it? Can someone answer this part for me?

The animation was all over the place from CG to Cartoon, to whatever. I felt rather bombarded by all the different art styles just as it happened in ‘Dante’s Inferno: An animated epic’. The only thing that saved this a little was that the stories were not all linked to one storyline like Dante. When I say Crappy artwork, I don’t mean bad artwork. I just mean stuff that really doesn’t look right in my eyes. The style that is so loaded with detail that you can see almost every line in the face right next to stuff that is very simplified. I may not be using the right word for it but I have no other idea what to use for it. Now the detail work pretty much is nice in the CG part, but I thought it never worked in the cartoon part of the show.

The voices are actually pretty well done and one of the only fluid parts of the show. They have voices that work out rather well for the mood that the ‘scene’ is trying to show. If it’s intense, it sounds intense, if it’s slow, it has that feeling. Some of the characters sound like they were voiced by some of the voice actors that were even in the matrix itself.