13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Just When You Thought The Wachowski Brothers Could Stoop No Lower
Date of Review: Jun 14, 2003
The Bottom Line: The Wachowski brothers may have created The Matrix series, but they're slowly bringing it to its grave. The Animatrix is just an add on to its death.
With the release of The Matrix: Reloaded, it seems the Wachowski brothers are going crazy over more and more things to release with the word Matrix on it. They released the game, which turned out to be a little enjoyable, but not revolutionary, like the movie itself. Now, they've released a series of 9 short, animated films straight to VHS and DVD. Can this possibly reclaim the name Matrix? Unfortunately, no.
The Wachowski brothers had a decent concept: release many different kinds of things with stories to get the full experience of The Matrix. However, I think they went over board with the whole "If you want to know the entire story you must see the movies, get this DVD, get this game, etc." It's too much!
So what does this DVD offer? Like I said before, 9 short, animated film, on this one DVD. The first of the 9 is Final Flight Of The Osiris, a short film that was shown with the movie Dreamcatcher as a further hype for The Matrix: Reloaded. The film proved successful in theaters, and it was a decent 10 minute long movie. However, if you think this is what the whole DVD is like, you are sadly mistaken. FFOTO is a 3D animation, while everything else on the DVD is an anime film. It also plays more like a movie than most of the other films. Most of the other films are explaining something, or showing one little thing that happened, while FFOTO shows a group of things that happened.
Next come The 2nd Renaissance parts 1 and 2. Though these are some of the stories that are explaining the history of the Matrix, they are much more interesting than later ones as well. It talks about the creation of robots, and how they slowly became dominant on earth.
Many of the rest of the short films were pointless. It seems that some of the ideas were just made to add more to the DVD and show off the animation technology. And, the film Kid's Story, which explains the past of the kid in The Matrix: Reloaded who always says that Neo saved him. It seems that this film was only put in to make a link between the movie and this DVD. The character had no major role in either, and wouldn't have made any impact if was taken off. Other stories, though filled with decently enjoyable action, just aren't explained, leaving you confused and frustrated. Other times you just become bored.
Though the animation sequence must have had a lot of work put into it, most of these short films weren't well thought out. Since they are only about 10 minutes each, it seems pointless to throw you into a story with new characters each time. They tried to throw a variety of characters into the films, but they ended up mostly having no personality or emotion. When certain people die, there's no reaction from you, because you barely even know who that person is, since you were just introduced to them a few minutes before.
Though it is lacking in interesting plot, it still has mostly superb animation and sound. A lot of work was definitely put into this, and it shows. I'd give them an A on animation and sound. However, in some cases, the colors just seem to bright or the animations being to wavey, making you turn your head or close your eyes. Besides these few moments, they are excellent.
I think this DVD set would have been better if there were less films, and the ones they had were longer. That way, they would eliminate the pointless stories, and give the interesting stories longer duration and more time to add to the plot.
The films on the set that were enjoyable were great. However, I constantly found myself bored during some of them, or just anxious to get past the slow parts (some of the films could have easily been done in 2 minutes, but they make them longer just so they won't be too short). With great sound and animation, this had a lot of potential. However, plot is always key in holding a good movie together. Hopefully, the Wachowski brothers will learn that they need to put more effort into their work, instead of just releasing a whole bunch of things that were poorly put together. If you are really into anime or art, I recommend to you only for the animations. Otherwise, pass this one up.
