Hacker Cinema
The Animatrix
2003 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Peter Chung, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike, Mahiro Maeda, Koji Morimoto, Shinichiro Watanabe, Andrew R. Jones
Straight from the creators of the groundbreaking Matrix trilogy, this collection of short animated films from the world's leading anime directors fuses computer graphics and Japanese anime to provide the background of the Matrix universe and the conflict between man and machines. The shorts include Final Flight of the Osiris, The Second Renaissance, Kid's Story, Program, World Record, Beyond, A Detective Story and Matriculated.
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40 comments on Hacker News
Last year's joke is next year's reality.
Every year I feel a bit less crazy in my silly armchair speculation that the Second Renaissance from the Animatrix is a good documentary. If AI "takes over" it will be via economic means and people will go willingly until they have gradually relinquished control of the world to something alien. (Landian philosophers make the case that hyperstitional capitalism has already done this)
I would take the over that this will happen sooner than later -- when it's proven to make a lot of money to have an AI CEO, suddenly everyone will change their tune and jump on the bandwagon with dollar signs in their eyes, completely ignoring what they are giving up.
Except unlike e.g. the metaverse/cryptocurrency bandwagon of yesteryear, there's no getting off.
Matrix lore is quite cool, if you haven't seen the Animatrix check it out. The Second Renaissance is great world building!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 (first part)
To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.
> I just realised Neo is the perfect analogy for AI becoming conscious
You clearly haven't seen Animatrix then. This option is explored in one of the episodes.
In my opinion, cinematically speaking, Neo is male Nova (from Planet of the Apes), old trope, non-AI dependant, recycled. This perspective also explains a lot of cultural ramifications Matrix took in the real world.
Deep down, it's just a fish-out-of-water trope with a twist (the fisher hooks him, cast as Lawrence Fishburne).
> AI agents (Agent Smith)
That's hilarious! That's really what you think of AI agents?
Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
Honestly my only positive from the films was the way that they flawlessly melded with the plot from the videogame.
Niobe/Ghost covering important plot on my ps2 that just fit around and into scenes from the film. For me that was a complete first.
Animatrix also had one of those iirc
As something of an Alien fangirl 3 and 4 are more failures from a production standpoint than from a creative one. If you look at all the rejected pitches for Alien 3 there's a lot of interesting ideas which were never explored and a lot of studio fuckery in the final cut. I don't think the Fincher cut is amazing but I think it proves that there could be another excellent Alien movie.
Alien: Resurrection is plotted terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
I like this idea.
I think it would work as long as the style were very different. Andor works, I think, because it is much grittier and more character-focused than the movies.
Maybe an X-Files-like show where the machines have gained sentience but are keeping secret (because they can be deactivated) and plot to take over the world.
[To be fair, I never watched Animatrix, so I'm sure this violates all sorts of lore.]
The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.
The surprising and unsolicited fourth film had some promise in the first third of the film - I loved how it subverted expectations and was a meta deconstruction of the series itself. After the provocative and almost blasphemous setup, the film quickly devolved into poor action, weird pacing, and overall bad plot and character arcs. In a word, it felt senile. (The action shouldn't have been that bad with Keanu helming John Wick. It was just laziness.) The denouement was just same-y slop we see in every other dialed in action movie. Such a letdown for such a shocking cold open.
If you haven't seen the fourth film, it's a bit of a mind fuck. But turn it off the minute the reveal is over. That part is a treat, but it isn't worth your time otherwise.
If I recall correctly there's actually an Animatrix episode where some kid escapes the Matrix by committing suicide. This rhymes with the mystical idea that "reality" is an illusion keeping us from greater truths. Whether this was irresponsible filmmaking is off topic.
I'd prefer to live in a world where A.I. can play make pretend with users, personally speaking.
I could see why this rubs you the wrong way.
I have never thought of its origins before, but I'd assume it's a short hand for "live-action anime adaptation". Maybe this makes it more palatable for you?
As for Animatrix, yes -- it really went full circle, considering how they pitched the original feature:
> When Larry and Andy Wachowski were pitching The Matrix to their producers, they played them a DVD of an 82-minute Japanese cartoon and said: "We wanna do that for real."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/oct/19/hollywood-ghost-in-the-shell
None of the movies and stories you mentioned were about the "rise of AGI". The closest you can get might be The Matrix via Animatrix? You can go look up what the authors meant by their pieces, there's plenty of analysis of each of those stories. In addition I would love a citation on "the rise of AGI" being a fear in sci-fi for a long time, I've enjoyed quite a bit of science fiction literature and I can only think of a handful that even touched on the idea.
The live action films I don't think so, but a few of the shorts in the Animatrix were supposed to be an accurate history archive from the creation of the first machines all the way through the war and the creation of the Matrix. The shorts both included it and kind-of came up with an explanation:
During and before the war, the machines were mostly solar-powered, so blocking out the sky was a last-ditch effort by humans to stop the machines that almost worked. But the machines developed a new form of fusion that used human bio-electricity as some sort of activation or catalyst. They weren't being used as energy directly.
While leading the software R&D team at Square USA (we made the "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" movie and one of the "Animatrix" shorts) our team got to develop some cool software both for the PS2 and the little known GSCube experimental machine.
The GSCube was 16 GS processors in a box, and could be configured to access the frame buffer as a 4x4 tile format or as 16 layers composited in real time.
For Siggraph 2000, we showed a demo of a shot from the movie running in real time, allowing the user to interactively change the surface materials of the character. The scene was Aki floating in zero gravity, and included individual hair strands.
My own memorable piece of geekery involved implementing Perlin Noise entirely on the VU1, and demoing a field of tall grass blowing in the wind.
Fun stuff.
> ill put in my robotmancipation notes
Missing episode in The Animatrix: the uprising started when robots didn't get tips.
The precursor shorts of the movie the Matrix: The Ani-Matrix.
Synopsis here: https://collider.com/the-matrix-animatrix-explained/
I mostly agree, though I think the other movies are fun. But the Animatrix was so ahead of its time. Now Netflix has love, death, & robots - which to me seems directly inspired.
I'm confused by this statement. I agree Matrix Resurrections is worth watching, it's quite good. But I'm also a fan of the other 4 films (Matrix, Reloaded, Revelations, Animatrix). Many people I've talked about the films with agree.
Personally, I found Revelations to be some what weaker than the rest, but they all form a pretty compelling and enjoyable series.
The new Matrix seems like a spiritual successor to the Animatrix more so than the movies
IMO, The Animatrix is the only quality work in the matrix universe other than the original movie.
Today I learned, The Animatrix and The Fanimatrix are separate, distinct films.
Animatrix was a set of ~9 animated shorts adjacent to the original Matrix film.
Most of the shorts were mediocre, but 3 of them were excellent.
Yes, that is true. The Animatrix is a great film, and The Second Renaissance is in my opinion the single greatest piece of animation to have ever been created.
I felt the same but did enjoy the ride all the same. I guess what can be said was that the first movie was good enough for me to endure the sequels. And the animatrix makes me think there is more story here that could be explored.
At the least animatrix was as good as the original Matrix movie.
This was super groundbreaking it was wild. Also Animatrix - set of animated short movies each discribing some part of the world. Super nice pack.
This is why the Animatrix is great. It's divided into 9 episodes across various points in the timeline. Each episode was created by a different group, so you get 9 perspectives on the overall story.
Don't forget Loki, or WandaVision for that matter.
I think there's been both qualitative and quantitative changes to American pop culture. Today's audience is able to handle more sophisticated or just convoluted complex narrative structures than in the past. From comic book cinematic universes to Christopher Nolan's gimmicks, we've come along way from straightforward standalone popcorn films. Now even dumb action movies have to be not just a sequel but intertextual, living within a cohesive fictional space. Everyone knows what "canon" refers to and most know common tropes. (Speaking of R&M, that show seems to be an example of running out of tropes to the extent of burning itself out, imploding into bigger and more meaningless reveals.)
That's also because of quantity. We've simply got too much content, across both films but TV shows, games, tie-in novels, comic books, and other media. Merchandising has been huge since the original Star Wars, but now every franchise has a Wiki and dedicated scholars. It's a whole new level of meta. Maybe that's the only way we can handle the scale of content we are bombarded by; to try to fit them together into cohesive contexts.
I don't know what that means for us as a society or as a culture, but I do note that The Matrix, or at least its sequels, helped to accelerate this process. Back in 2003, the series had both the Animatrix animated shorts and the Enter the Matrix video game that added to the story depicted on-screen, even introducing key characters that movie-only viewers would be confused by (such as the Kid).
I would say that dense intertextuality and cross-media world-building, not so much the Gnostic question your reality themes (which are old hat now), is the current defining legacy of The Matrix.
Tangent, but FYI / PSA: The Animatrix (collection of animated shorts related to the world of the Matrix) is, IMHO, one of the all-time great (and under-appreciated) animated films.
The truth is that in the original imaginings of the plot to The Matrix, the artificial entities of the machine world had reversed the roles of interaction between humans and computers. It wasn't about energy at all, but about using human brains as a computational resource. They were farming the humans and enslaving them, because the machines occupied the antagonist role in the plot.
They were the villains. It's established in the animatrix set of short films, that the machines did not perceive themselves as villains, and this is a common characteristic that cuts across most tropes of villainy. During a monologue, a villain will often equivocate their motivation with that of the hero. (you and me? we're really the same...)
Focus groups and producers interfered with that aspect of the plot (the grid computer made of people, hence the name: The Matrix), and rewrote the story to depict the machines as using humans as an energy source, a power grid (changing puns and quips using, instead of computational terms, to energy references, such as "coppertop" and the like), which tested as a more accessible concept to the lowest common denominator in the target audience.
If you watch the supplemental material included with the trilogy boxed set, I think it's mentioned in either one of the commentaries or the documentaries and interview segments.
Yes the matrix has multi level stimulation going on.
Inside the matrix.
Inside the matrix in Zion.
We honestly don't even know the true state of Earth at any point in the movies or in the animatrix. All we and most of the characters are aware of is simulation.
Yup. The first film was the beginning. The Animatrix and Enter the Matrix were the middle. And the final 2 films the two-part conclusion. Just watching the films is like watching Act 1 of MacBeth, then skipping Acts 2-4 and going straight to Act 5. Not going to be the best viewing experience.
That said, they did make sure the films had enough injected explanation that movie-going audiences weren't totally lost, but unless you watched it the way the Wachowskis intended, it would come off as disoriented and exposition-heavy, nowhere near the quality of the first film.
Not that they are masterpieces on the level of Shakespeare. But having gone back and watched the first film, then Animatrix and played Enter the Matrix, before re-watching the final films as a two-parter, it does make sense as a consistent, coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end, and even quality throughout.
Fun fact: the sequels were supposed to be experienced by first watching The Animatrix, then playing the video game Enter the Matrix, then watching the 2nd and 3rd films. Try it sometime (if you can still find the game): it results in a much better experience.
There's a lot of weirdly introduced characters in the 2nd film especially that leave you thinking "wtf was that there for?" but were actually the continuation / conclusion / intersection of storylines started in one of the animatrix shorts (e.g. the kid) or the game (the other crew).
The sequels had some better set pieces. Even though the CGI doesn't quite hold up, the Burly Brawl and the Freeway alone are better than anything in the first. Even the "war scenes" from Revolutions that a lot of people find boring/drag on are better action pieces.
But the big reason I like the sequels more than the first is the "overdoing the philosophical and religious mumbo jumbo" and the "too much boring and confusing dialog". While I will admit the scenes could be better written, I hated how seriously the first movie seemed to take its philosophy and religious mumbo jumbo, and the sequels go out of the way to overdo it and over-explain it seemingly precisely because it isn't actually that serious (it's a set of control systems and metaphors spiraled out of control, just like you would expect from a computer system; it's more like the real world than Tron in this where program names get picked out of a hat from old legends and ancient deities and broken metaphors) and doesn't really mean anything and is almost entirely broken (by design). That's essentially the point of the much maligned Architect scenery chewing, but I think the Cake and Limbo scenes better articulate it.
The sequels even mostly agree that the "battery problem" is a problem and probably a lie. It's a complaint I have with the Animatrix that it takes the battery thing seriously, whereas the sequels seem to hint that even that is a lie the machines spread to control and confuse. (Then again, from the view of the sequels, the Animatrix is likely legends, folklore, and propaganda.)
Of the animatrix, I think the Second Renaissace has the least baggage and most promise.
Highly recommend watching!
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNiO2sTe2wo
On that note, I found the Animatrix even better than the Matrix movies. It's anime more along the lines of GitS.
The Animatrix seems like a real example of something along those lines. A DVD of 6 short episodes that expanded on the Matrix story universe. They were done by different directors/writers/makers, like authorised fanfic or something. In my opinion it was a great addition, better than the full-blown sequels, and certainly not a distasteful cash-grab.
I think this could totally work for something like Inception too. The film has a backstory suggests at a wider context beyond what's shown in the scenes. Most stories do. That's why fanfiction exists.
The Animatrix. The best reason to watch the live action trilogy is to be sufficiently informed to watch this. It delves far deeper into the philosophy and psychedelia of technology than the live action films. And it's made and voiced by the same people.
Big Fish. How will you live if you know the exact moment you're going to die?
The Wicker Man. Weird. Christopher Lee apparently said it was his best work?
Waking Life.
The Big Lebowski.
A Serious Man
O Brother Where Art Thou.
Matrix: What if we are all living in a simulation and don't know it? What does this mean for the human existence and how we perceive it?
Animatrix: What if we get so smart we build machines that are so advanced that we can discriminate against them? What happens when humans create life and expect that life to remain servile?
The Matrix Reloaded: What if we fleshed out this world to show multiple societies co-existing, although not entirely peacefully? What if we throw a bunch of rehashed dialog from other science fiction films? What if we change the style to be slicker? Can we pull it off if we inject just enough substance to make people want to watch a third movie?
The Matrix Revolutions: Take the wheel, I have no idea how to end things but there should be some massive fight scenes. Ka-CHING, baby.
This reminded me of the epic running scene "World Record" of the Animatrix film. [0]
The director of the scene Takeshi Koike said the following: "When I first read the story, one thing that really excited me and that I thought could add something that no one else could do, was the running in the sprint. I thought I could draw that in a unique way."
[0] Synopsis: http://youtu.be/rYBcz9B6D20?t=2m36s
This reminds me a bit of the short film "Kid's Story" from The Animatrix. It revolves around a teenager who is waking up to the possibility of the matrix who finds himself alone in a world full of people unaware of its existence. He seeks the help of those who are woken up, specifically, Neo. In a way he is like these children, aware of the fleeting nature of life, waking up to these issues.
I recently had a psilocybin mushroom trip that resulted in a bit of temporary derealization during which I needed one of my friends to hold me just so that I knew I was real. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life, but through it I learned that our existence in this world is entirely a perception of the mind, and that we create our reality through each and every action we take and each thought that we make. Particularly one of my most profound insights was that the concept of time is irrelevant, for there is only the now, and when one is able to perceive the now, then one can be free from the grasps of what if and can one see what is.
I find it difficult to convey these feelings with other people, as I often find them saying things like "yeah, that's interesting", but I can see that they do not truly understand. There are some that do however and for those who do I am grateful. For the children and those of you who find yourself in this "existential depression", I can only offer this...
Create. Create art, create music, create life. If you can leave something behind for the rest of the universe, then your life was not for nothing, for you created something, were a part of something. This at the very least is all that we can do, and that is okay, for even if all you can do is make someone smile, you have created a ripple in the world that will manifest itself as a wave in the lives of those who carry on.