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I'll be honest - I was expecting a pretty
crappy time watching this. Despite the Wachawski brothers love of
anime, I wasn't sure if the Matrix could successfully create a viable
cartoon canon for the epic movie, especially one that was free to
download. I'm happy to say that this exceeded expectations, and then
some.
The first, entitled "The Second Renaissance" story takes
us back to the beginning - humanity had discovered advanced robot
technology, and the anime, shot as an archived documentary detailing
the history of humanity as held in the Zion mainframe, details events
that led to the hostilities that sowed the seeds of our eventual downfall.
And its fascinating.
The animation is of a very high standard - easily comparable to Metropolis
in the CGI stakes, and the dubbing, consisting mostly of a female
voice over, is excellently done, and augmented by an excellent script.
Whilst only a 10 minute animation, it fills in the history of the
films very efficiently, and the small visiual references to things
that are to come, such as the eventual changes to the design of the
robots themselves, seeming to evolve from human shaped characters
to the more menacing creatures found in the films, is excellently
realised.
Now, the only drawback to The Animatrix is the file size - its 31Mb
at its smallest, so if you have a 56k modem, you're in for a pretty
long wait. ADSL makes the job much quicker, but it really is worth
persevering with.
You can download The Animatrix from the website, www.theanimatrix.com.
The DVD, containing 8 features from some of the best Japanese studios
such as Madhouse and Square, is now on sale. Shinichiro Watanabe's
Detective Story is my personal favourite, though each one holds its
own - each is dark and stylish, and the disc is well worth the money.
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Check out the superbly dark and atmospheric Cyber City Oedo 808. Produced
by Madhouse (who worked on the Animatrix) its stylishly directed,
beuatifully designed and foul of language ^_^