by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an oddball 2993 film called The Animatrix, a series of eight or nine shorts (the difference is whether you count the second and third items in the sequence, “The Second Renaissance,” as one short or two because it’s presented in two parts but tells a continuous story) based on or inspired by the fictional universe of The Matrix and its first two sequelae. Alas, Charles and I had to advance the DVD manually to play each short film in sequence because, though there was a “Play All” button, I missed it until we were already into the fourth or fifth film in the sequence and Charles took on the task of navigating the disc menu to watch the films in onder. The first was “Finao Flight of the Osiris,” which begins with a duel between a hunky Black guy (Kevin Michael Richardson) and a vaguely Asian-looking women (Pamela Adlon) in which each party successively cuts off bits of the clothing of the other as they fight with long swords. Charles joked that this seemed like a roundabout way to get undressed, and also, given my obsession with interracial porn, he joked when we saw Richardson’s animated avatar with no shirt, “All of a sudden, this became your favorite movie of all time!” I joked back, “Well, it would be if it were live-action.”
Then the film cuts to the interior of a starship under enemy attack, and it felt like we’d been wrenched into a fantasy world owing a lot more to Star Wars or Alien than The Matrix, as the ship sailed into a combat zone that used to be the Earth we know but has now become a graveyard for humans. The two people we saw dueling in the opening scene turn out to be Thadeus, the ship’s captain, and Jen, his first mate, and in the end Jen takes a risky downward dive to warn the city of Zion, the last stand of normal humanity in a world in which machines have taken over and are using humans as their energy source, that the all-powerful machines are coming to obliterate them. Midway through Jen’s death scene she admits that, though they were supposed to be fighting the duel blindfolded, Jen says, “I peeked,” and Thaddeus says, “I peeked,too.”
The next two films were parts one and two of “The Second Renaissance,” a sort of prequel to the entire Matrix cycle in which human beings develop ever more powerful machines, which as in Karel Capek’s pioneering 1920’s play R.U.R. (the initials stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” and it was for this play that Capek coined the term “robot” for an artificial human, from the Czech word robotnik, meaning “worker”) ultimately rebel and develop the ability to reproduce themselves, presumably sexually. Human beings become increasingly desperate in their attempts to stop the rebellion of the machines, including a last-gasp campaign called “Operation Dark Cloud,” in which they send up rockets to create a dense fog that will literally turn the sky black and cut off the machines from the sun that is their only source of energy. Alas, the machines, which because they are electromechanical are not subject to decay and eventual death the way we puny little humans are, manage to subjugate the human race after all by tapping into our own bodies as their energy source and setting up “The Matrix” as an elaborate human delusion in which we continue to live what we think are our normal lives even though we’re really nothing more than an energy source for the all-powerful machines we created and then they destroyed us.
The fourth film on the program is “Kid’s Story,” which incorporates Kenau Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss from the original Matrix cycle (they’re the only actors who’ve been in all four of the Matrix movies) in a tale of a rebellious high-school student named Michael Karl Popper (Clayton Watson) whose cell phone rings in class, attracting the derision of his teacher. He turns off the phone but it rings anyway, and ultimately he takes the call and ends up fleeing for his life through the hallways of his high school until he discovers he has the power to defy gravity and survive a leap from a tall building. The fifth film is “Program,” in which a woman named Cis (Hedy Burress) and a man named Duo (Phil LaMarr) fight a duel to the death in an Asian-style setting and Duo is trying to persuade Cis to return to the Matrix and lead the illusion of a nurmal human life rather than stay outside the Matrix and risk annihilation by the machines. Later we learn that Duo is just a computer simulation (one of the most annoying things about the Matrix movies is how hard you have to listen to the dialogue to realize which characters are human and which are computer-simulated software) and Cis is being trained to be a warrior for the liberation of humanity – though in the end she’s so upset with the training she slaps one of the trainers across the face and the trainer says, “Aside from that last bit, I’d say she passed.”
Next up is “World Record,” which like “Program”: was written by Yoshiki Kawajin (one of the must peculiar aspects of this production is how many of the directors were Japanese while the grunt work of actually animating the film was done by Koreans – an ironic reflection of the decades in which Korea was a Japanese possession) but told a far more fascinating story of a track star, Dan (Victor Williams), whoi keeps pushing for a new world’s record that he thinks no one will ever be able to break, even as the people around him warn him he’s literally putting his life in danger – and he ends up collapsing at the finish of his race (in which he sets the world record) and ending up in a wheelchair, where supposedly he discovers the secret of the Matrix. Seventh in the sequence is “Beyond,” in which a young woman looking for her lost cat stumbles into a world beyond the one she normally lives in.
Eighth is the film “A Detective Story,” in which a burned-out private detective who thought the job would be like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe (both of whom are name-checked in the dialogue) is hired by a mysterious voice on his phone to find the reclusive hacker Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss again). He can’t say no because the mystery client has already deposited the fee for the job into the detective’s account, and he goes forth in search of Trinity (whom he assumes is a man even though we know she’s a woman) even though he knows that the previous detectives on the job have either committed suicide, died or gone crazy. The ninth segment is “Matriculated” and it appears to be about the training the Sentinels, the soldiers in the machines’ army who look like giant insects, go through to be ready for their job of spotting nay potential human resistance to the machine order and snuffing it out immediately.
The Animatrix is perched uneasily between American animation styles and Japanese animé – there’s even a bonus item on the disc, which we didn’t watch, on the history and traditions of animé – and the movie has an appealing mix of techniques ranging from the blocky computer-animation style of “Final Flight of the
