Apparently, Warner Brothers is making a series of short anime films explaining more about the history of the Matrix to promote the upcoming movies. You can see the first one here.
My impressions? Well, I’ve never liked anime, and I thought the first movie was OK at best, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that my reaction was “Eh.” I won’t give it away, but I thought it was very predictable and cliched. But what can you expect from the writers that brought us “Humans are batteries!!”?
Still, it was kinda interesting, and I figured I’d post it for the more hardcore fans out there.
A second “Meh.” Lots o’ cliches, but then again I don’t watch much anime.
The “racist humans get what they deserve” angle has less of a hook to me than “cocky humans get wiped out by their own creations,” which seemed to be the premise of the movie. How about recycling instead of dumping them all in the ocean?
Why do all the robots look like people? I kept getting Mega Man flashbacks (though that may be because they all had goofy little hardhats).
I liked it, but it had nothing to do with the Matrix. Had the Matrix shown the world taken by cute robots in top hats and bowlers, I don’t think it would have done as well.
As BraheSilver says, one of the appealing things about the first movie was that there were no cliche human-shaped robots (which never make much sense anyway.) When the human race’s end comes, it’s more likely to be the doing of something that looks like a forklift or an industrial robot or your home PC.
I liked the animation, but this just doesn’t at ALL seem like the way it should have happened. I don’t know, I got more of a Collossus type image in my head of the machine take over. Like Wumpus said, I figured the machines that took over would look more like machines, not cyborgs.
Plus, I find it funny that there was apparently a big hearing because it was discovered that one robot seemed to have attained conciousness. This was a big deal apparently, yet, seemingly, robots already had their own livelihood…nieghborhoods, jobs, personalities, etc. Hard to find one robot’s desire to live shocking when every other robot already acts and displays human emotion. Plus, the concept of country 01 just doesn’t make sense either. I don’t know, I liked the animation and all, but it just didn’t seem to fit with the already existing Matrix world. Maybe as part of Robot Carnival 2, but not the Matrix.
Actually, the trial of the rob was written in hypertext comic form by the Wachowski brothers a while back. I don’t have a direct link, but if you poke around the Matrix website you’ll find it in Series 1 of the comic section.
It’s actually really interesting, as the story is told both through comics and trial transcripts:
The robot in question is a cleaning droid. His masters talk about scrapping him and getting a new, fancier unit. The robot, arguably in self-defense, kills his masters. He is then able to secure legal counsel and take his case to court as a test case. The case is compared to the Dred Scott case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves were not citizens, and therefore could bring suit or be represented at trial–and in both Dred Scott and the droid trials, the petitioners lose. The parallel is food for thought, at least.
As for the design of the robots–well, I’ll give them artistic license. I could actually believe that cleaning droids would have such a stylized look and humanoid construction–what better form than a biped with arms to reach into nooks and crannies to sweep, but still be able to make beds and cook breakfast? As for hard labor droids…[shrug].
Ah, well, you may not have noticed this then. The robots that the humans designed looked like androids, but the seconds generation of AI that the robots created at 01 looked more like the Sentinels from the movie. This chapter, “The Second Renaissance”, takes place before the robot-human wars, so I imagine that the robots that do take over the world later will look like machines.
I really wish they hadn’t called it the “Zion Historical Database” or whatever, because so many elements of this short did not fit with a historical database. The biblical references (calling humans “Man”, for instance) (although I understand that they’re carrying on the motif from the film), the glowy muse-looking woman, the unnecessarily long zooming intros, and the patently un-impartial descrpition of events all bugged me because it was supposed to be a historical text. If they had just had a narrator tell the story instead, I would have been fine with it.
Yeah, I didn’t like it. I LOVED the Matrix movie, but this is not the way I saw it. Thank God this anime isn’t what the sequal will be like. I’m going to consider the Matrix movie world and the “anime” Matrix world two separate enterprises.
I started a thread to discuss the historical imagery used in the short here. Like the pyramid building slaves and the Tiananmen Square Massacre influence on the tanks during the robot protests.
Only like an idiot I spelled Animatrix wrong in the subject :smack: So you won’t find it on a search for animatrix threads.
Also the comics online from the first matrix movie are a very good read. Its like a different take/story on a similar theme by several artists. Very similar to what I expect these Animatrix movies to be like. Try this link to the comics - here.
No, I noticed that, it was pretty hard to miss. I just think the whole concept of the robot city was pretty dumb. I mean, okay, these sentient robots get sick of being used as automotons by humans because they feel they are alive as well and thus deserve a proper life, so they create a city in which they build worker drones who are stuck in an assembly line to make cars to sell to humans? What? It makes no sense. The whole concept of a city for robots is stupid enough and doesn’t fit for the world of the Matrix. I envisioned it more like The Terminator, where originally, the robots were meant to do menial tasks and weapons and the like. The big computers figured humans were a waste and getting in their way, and thus, revolted. The following armies of non-human looking robots were obviously created by something that recognized humanoid robots were foolish and useless and highly innefficient. So, why would this new city of robots create those, plus more humanoid robots, plus slave robots and still deal with humans, when it was humanity’s contempt for them that forced them to have to leave the human cities and create one for themselves where they could not be persocuted.
Argh, my brain’s hurting. Basically, interesting story, just doesn’t belong in the world of The Matrix. Horrible set up for a great movie.
I thought it wasn’t bad, but I’m not sold on the idea that even if man can make machines with emotions that they put said emotions in butler and cleaning robots. Why would anybody do that?
Were emotions something that happened by accident? That’s not much easier to swallow.
I rather liked the short. It was a different take on the idea of the Matrix.
Which is pretty much how I see the whole idea behind the Animatrix. I seriously doubt that this is going to be stuff that’s strictly consistent to the universe presented in the movies, it’s the same idea presented in different ways. Sort of like our own famous “If LOTR were written by…” thread.
That said, I rather enjoyed the Metropolis references and the historical parallels drawn by the first short. Nice animation, too. The tank running over the robot actually made me wince. Brutal.
I haven’t seen the animes in question, but I can say that for certain tasks (such as a household servant), a humaniform robot makes sense. Not because the human form is the most efficient (for efficiency, four legs would probably be more useful than two, just for starters), but because people want things that look like people. On an assembly line, this isn’t a big deal, but in a person’s home, it would be. Think R2D2 and C3PO. R2 was made for spacecraft repair, and therefore has a very utilitarian form. 3PO, however, was made for interacting with humans, and therefore has a human form.
True, and they showed some humanoid robots in settings where it made sense. However, they also showed huge masses of humanoid robots being used to haul giant blocks to build, for some reason, a pyramid. Obviously, they did this to make it more symbolic and show us how us eeeeevil humans are once again opressing the innocent and forcing them to do hard labor. But that still doesn’t explain why they didn’t just make one huge-ass robotic crane to do the job instead.
Well to speculate, maybe the human’s were too lazy. They had the perfect slave race to do all menial service and labor work, why make things easier for their slaves. Give the robots work to do, a task to achieve or be recycled. The robots weren’t actually allowed to make more machines better or smarter than themselves until after the riots and their new city. (tho it was mostly likely a plot device to show the symbolism like you mentioned)
I think its a great idea of the Wachowski Brothers to open up the matrix world to other artists interpretations and ideas. (I’m sure they have final approval of everything on the WB site) Even casual Matrix fans are sure to find something in the upcoming shorts that they like, or in the comics I linked to above.
