Review of The Animatrix (2003) by Edith N — 30 Nov 2008

I have a confession to make. (I may make a full entry of True Movie Confessions" soon.) I still haven't seen the second two [i]Matrix[/i] movies, and it frankly doesn't bother me. I wasn't all that impressed with the first one. It was shiny, and I love Hugo Weaving, but for one thing, I have a really hard time believing that Keanu Reeves is the saviour of anything. Maybe I would've gotten more into it if I'd seen it in the theatre, but for various reasons, that didn't end up happening. Someone I knew in college once went on at me about the exciting originality of the film, and I just can't agree with her, because she meant the mythology. Which wasn't even original when Lucas used it in [i]Star Wars[/i]. Even brains-in-a-jar has been a staple of sci-fi for many, many years. So I did not go into [i]The Animatrix[/i] with the highest of expectations.

The movie really isn't one; it's a series of shorter films detailing the realities and not-realities of the Matrix. Not the italicized movie, mind--the actual thing itself. All of the stories involve either people who aren't in it or people who discover some of its flaws. Two of the segments, in fact, deal with the creation of the Matrix, probably giving away key plot points of the second movies while it's at it. (Obviously, I wouldn't know.) There is a brief Keanu Reeves cameo, but no Hugo Weaving. I feel cheated by this.

It's a brilliant idea, even if this idea isn't particularly original, either. (I own a book, written before the movie came out, of short stories set in someone else's world. Short stories set in your [i]own[/i] world are less original than that.) The stories aren't terribly tied together, but I think that's okay. They don't have to be. Probably they serve to tie together more of what I'm told is a fairly disjointed trilogy, but I don't think that's at all certain. The first segment probably does, but I don't know about the one with the cat.

The animation doesn't really grab me. The one with the cat was animated like the better class of anime, but a lot of them were in "look, it's animated!" style. Some were in hyper-realism. There was a nice one that was all noir-ish, but for the most part, I didn't feel as visually arrested as I had by the first movie, and as I've said, I thought the visuals were the best part about it. The fact that everyone else seems to disagree with me about the visual styles here does not bother me at all; these reviews are my opinion, and mine was that most of this movie wasn't anything to write home about. And I'm not. Because my mother doesn't read this journal. Anyway. I wasn't jazzed by a lot of the colour usage, and I think most of the styles were used to make things Look Interesting, and I'd rather people put some energy into making them look good, even if only to their own eye, instead.

Maybe someday I'll get to the second two in the trilogy, though the review I encountered claiming that the Wachowski brothers had clearly felt the problem with the first movie was that it did not resemble [i]Wrath of Khan[/i] enough does not, it should be said, inspire confidence. However, a lot of people who know I just didn't jump on the [i]Matrix[/i] bandwagon have said that I should watch this instead. And, indeed, I'm glad I have. I do like the noir one, and the one with the cat. I just don't think I can really advise watching any entire movie for just those segments and the fact that it's mostly pretty shiny.