The Animated Matrix Film Beats All The Sequels

➡ The text is a conversation about the Cartoon Cabal’s review of the Animatrix, a collection of animated short films based on the Matrix franchise. The speakers discuss the quality of the animation, comparing it to video games and other animated series. They also talk about their personal opinions on the Matrix franchise and how the Animatrix fits into it. They particularly focus on the first short film, “Final Flight of the Osiris”, discussing its plot and animation style.
➡ The text discusses the Animatrix, a series of nine animated short films based on the Matrix trilogy. It compares the Animatrix to Fantasia, noting that viewers can mix and match the order of the segments after watching the first few. The text also discusses the plot of the Animatrix, which begins with a scene from the Matrix and transitions into a different world. It mentions the Second Renaissance, a two-part segment that explains the origin of the Matrix, and the Flight of Osiris, which was mistakenly placed at the end of the series by some broadcasters. The text also discusses the influence of Japanese anime on the Matrix and the Animatrix, and the involvement of anime creators in the production of the Animatrix.
➡ The text discusses a movie where humans initially win against robots, but over time, the robots reassemble themselves, creating an improved version called the O1. This new version becomes so advanced that it creates its own currency, surpassing human-backed currencies, and attempts to join the UN. When rejected, tensions escalate, leading to a war where humans block out the sun to limit the robots’ energy source. However, this move backfires, benefiting the robots more than humans. The robots then start using humans as a power source, leading to speculation that human brains might be used as processors.
➡ The text discusses various segments of the Animatrix, a collection of animated short films set in the Matrix universe. It highlights the unique art styles, storylines, and characters in each segment, such as a younger Neo in ‘Kid’s Story’ and a world-class runner who breaks the Matrix’s physical limits in ‘World Record’. The text also mentions the involvement of the Wachowskis, creators of the Matrix, in some segments and the influence of other anime works on the Animatrix.
➡ The text discusses an animated series with various episodes, each having a unique style and story. One episode is about a haunted house in the Matrix where physics laws are different, and kids use it as a playground. Another episode is a noir-style detective story featuring Trinity. The last episode mentioned is about humans trying to convert a robot to their side using digital drugs, resulting in a psychedelic experience for the robot.
➡ In a story involving a robot and a woman, the robot saves the woman’s life and uploads her consciousness into its own. However, the woman freaks out and runs away, leaving the robot alone. The story ends with the robot living a life of solitude. The animation style is reminiscent of the late 90s and early 2000s, and despite some outdated 3D elements, it has a nostalgic aesthetic.
➡ This text seems to express strong emotions and thoughts, possibly related to competition or conflict. It mentions overcoming challenges, dealing with negativity, and continuing to strive despite difficulties. The language suggests a sense of defiance and resilience.

The premise was that humans were being generated for their heat. So basically like little BTUs. So much fun and games at the Cartoon Cabal beyond what’s just in a name at the Cartoon Cabal See, just at one cost comes fame at the Cartoon Cabal. So much for the fun and games at the Cartoon Cabal. Hello, welcome to the Cartoon Cabal where we look through all the matrices of animation, anime, Animatrix. That’s where we are today. We’re taking a look at. Well, I guess this is described here as a franchise film. Does is a franchise film like a.

Not a main sequence film and something that just kind of hangs off of the side? I, I guess so like Star Wars, Clone wars or something. Gotta be animated. I honestly, I don’t play by the rules. I play by my own rules. And I feel like since we’re talking about Animatrix, to me, Animatrix is, is more canon than some of the actual Matrix movies. Oh, okay. I, well one, this does have my favorite sequence in pretty much Matrix Land, I guess. But yes, it’s mad here over there. It’s a paranoid American. How’s it flowing? How, how’s your bits and green.

Green bits dropping down? Well, honestly, I’m kind of excited about this one, man, because we’re not really, I don’t really have a reason to talk about the Matrix mov for any reasons. But since we’re doing Cartoon Cabal, this is one of the ones that was in the back of my head the entire time we were talking about getting into non Disney animation. Because this is one of my, my absolute favorite aspects of the entire Matrix franchise. It goes the movie and then it goes Animatrix and then I can kind of take or leave some of the movies and even the video game.

We’re not going to talk about that. But that one also is apparently canon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was like the online 1 for 8 years and then the plot points like connect with the, the later movie or something and something. I keep up with all that. I barely even kept up beyond like the Matrix 2. Just for the record, to, to the Matrix’s credit, it. That wasn’t like required viewing. I mean, Well, I think both you and I are going to say the Animatrix is required viewing, but technically it’s not. Right. You know, you, you can just do that.

Okay, yeah, that. But you’re here, you’re here for our opinion, hopefully. And I, I think that this is absolutely required viewing. It goes Matrix 1 and then Animatrix and then Whatever order you feel like doing after that. I could probably agree with that. I think I like the sequels better than you, but I am. I, I put them on an even keel, that’s for sure. Now I’m just thinking like, Star wars, you know, like, like there is important information here, but Star wars, you walk into that last movie and it’s like, why is the emperor back? Oh, because I don’t play Fortnite.

What? I don’t know if you remember that, but the emperor comes back in a Fortnite special event. So then the movie starts and it’s like, the emperor’s back. It’s like, why? That’s stupid. I, I gotta say, I care about the Matrix at least a thousand times more than I care about Star Wars. Well, good, because I need to read their. I just threw their franchise franchising methods under the bus. And, And I’m saying the Matrix ones work well. This is one of the more successful, like weird and silly. Incendiary. Not incendiary film on the side. Thank you.

There’s some words. I know them, I just. You can’t, you know, I mushmouth them out. It’s because you’ve been in Japan too long. It probably is. Like, when I was teaching In America like 20 years ago, I, I, it might have actually been a complaint, but I thought it was a compliment at the time where someone’s like, I barely understood what he was saying. He was using so many big words, which 20 years in Japan kind of rocked that out of me. Why many big word when small word just as good? Well, that’s how I function now.

But when I was a 24 year old pretentious freak, I was like talking about the great outdoors. Using four syllable words, apparently. So. Okay, I’m glad I know Monosyllabic, Matt. Yeah. Yeah. For podcasting, that would be infuriating if I did that all the time. Infuriating. Five syllable word. Okay, just checking. Yeah. You said you’re gonna guide a bit through this. It seems like Fantasia, the order of how these go is like a little bit under, you know, not debate, but I think, like what I was. The list I was following on Wiki is different than the list.

Like I watched them in, for example. What, where, where do you want to start? Well, I watched them in the right order, which was just how they came in the movie itself, so. Well, let me start by just saying if you haven’t seen the Animatrix, it’s a mixtape. It’s a little assortment of different animations. They each Attack different aspects of the Matrix. If you imagine the Matrix were real, the entire reality of that movie series, if that were real, here’s like a whole bunch of little vignettes and little mini episodes of just little pockets of life.

It’s like slice of life in the Matrix. Right. I think that’s kind of the best way to like just summarize this entire nine episode movie. Yeah, I can go with that. Nine, But. So where we start? Final Flight of the Osiris. Osiris. Osiris. That seems. That’s. That’s where I started anyway. Well, I. I just call this one the sexy fight one. Like, that’s. And honestly, I’ve seen this movie probably five or six times, but it’s. It’s been at least a few years since last time I’d seen any of it. And I didn’t even realize there was more to it other than the sexy fight scene.

I just completely forgot about the rest of it. So that’s always kind of what this first one. And. And let me just say, when this first came out, like, I saw this the year it came out, that fight scene was really impressive. It was. It was better than most of the other 3D that I had seen in even theaters at this point. Right. And it showed before Dreamcatcher, apparently, before ending up in this compilation. Did you go to see Dreamcatcher? I did not see this in the theater. You know, I’ve seen Dreamcatcher, but I did not see this before dream.

I watched Dreamcatcher off like a DVD or something. But yeah, it was. This is early 2000s, right? Like really early 2000s. Yeah. I mean, they did promote this one. Pretty sure I bought the dvd. Like, when it came out, it must have had. I think it had like kind of a limited run in theaters, but it did show in theaters. Let me double check that, actually, now that I’m thinking about it. Originally. Okay. Oh, no. Straight. Straight to video. Except for this segment, this is the only one that got a cinematic release. And so the very first one, yeah, it’s called Final Flight of the Osiris.

And basically it starts with them in training mode. And there was an. In the Matrix movie, this is where Keanu was fighting Morpheus and they’ve got like a little like Japanese sort of like fight scene going on. And then in this movie, it’s like a black guy fighting an Asian chick and they’re using swords and they’re slowly undressing each other by chopping off their clothes bit by bit. And then they get pulled out of it. Because the Matrix be doing Matrix stuff. Let’s use the AI to do the same scene. But now it is Neo and Morpheus cutting off each other’s clothing.

And they keep like lifting up the blindfold and looking. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I have sick notes on this one. The first three are that. Although. Okay, which. Which PlayStation cutcene level are we looking at? I guess three. Yeah, I. I would say about. I actually made that same note. The only difference is that maybe the like, little particle effects of explosions and dust clouds and stuff that might be beyond what like video game consoles were doing. But you can do this, like this scene. I remember thinking, man, I wonder if video games or when video games will get this good.

It took about like 15 years, I’d say, probably, to actually meet the fidelity of the animation of that. Now once they do get outside, we go into, you know, like, messed up Matrix land outside. Matrix land. What, the Dead Earth. Okay, we’ll call it that. That stuff looks exactly like the movie almost, right? Which the. The Clone Wars. Star wars stuff also capitalized on. Because when you see the characters, you’re getting these characterize CG things. I’m talking about the CG Clone wars, not the 2D one. But yeah, once you get into the space battles and stuff, you’re like, well, it looks like Star Wars.

And here it’s like, once they get out, you’re like, well, looks like the Matrix. And you were mentioning a little bit of Fantasia. But just like Fantasia, you can sort of mix and match what comes after a certain point. But you still have to see Fantasia. I think, like the first one or two segments, you’d still have to see those as the first and the second. And in this case, this is definitely the beginning of the Animatrix because it transitions you from. Okay, I. I remember this scene from the Matrix and I remember this kind of back plot where they’re in Dead Earth.

I like that idea. They’re like floating around in dead or fighting like actual big robots and stuff. That. That is your entry point. Because all that goes away immediately as soon as this first of the nine episodes is over. It kind of thrust you into a completely different world. Okay. I’m figuring out what. Where my ordering confusion was. It seems that the Australians mixed it up and HBO Max mixed it up and throws this at the end instead of the beginning. The Flight of Osiris. Yeah, they totally screwed up what you just said. That’s stupid. But, you know, it’s Australian, so they’re upside down.

So that makes You Max. Although the next one is the Second Renaissance, which I. Part one and two, which I consider sort of to be the. The core of this whole thing, which I. I guess that’s why you don’t show up first. You don’t. You don’t play your biggest. Your. Your ace in the whole first. Or maybe you do. I agree that the first second of the. The Second Renaissance, part one and two is the reason to see Animatrix. There’s a whole bunch of other ones that are well worth seeing, but this is the one that actually shows you where the Matrix started.

And it basically started with robots that were made to be our butlers and our vacuum cleaners. And they just started getting advanced enough to the point where they fought back. One of them realized they were going to get turned off or they were going to get shut down and murdered a human. And that started everything. It started legal battles and ethical, like philosophy and protest and eventually the enslavement of the entire human species on a long enough timeline. But I love seeing like the, the exact origin point, like this is the moment that the Matrix began on, like its spiral.

Yeah. And I was thinking like a. Movies around the same time period. You could easily just plug the iRobot movie with Will Smith or AI pretty much directly into the second Renaissance. Like those could be more. You can consider those Matrix stories if you want. You know, and it’s. And this isn’t necessarily doing anything different. It’s the same kind of robot uprising story where they find out that you’re going to turn them off or they find out that you have something planned and they’re gonna circum. You know, navigate it. So I think that the way that it’s done, though, you see like, people’s heads getting squished and like, it’s.

It’s a very violent series of events. And it. It kind of tries to be sympathetic. And they’re like, my favorite part. And part of this is that as soon as the robot kills the human, all of a sudden the legal defense for this individual robot is that maybe it’s conscious or whatever. But then it shows people protesting in the streets, like, in favor of the robot over the human being that had their head exploded by the robot. I should do a little production stuff as we move on through this. The final flight of Osiris is pretty much, what, Square usa, You know, like Square Enix, I assume just their USA guys.

Yeah. And guys. But it’s. Yeah, it’s like. It’s Americans and. Or Canadians making that now is where we start. The genesis of the Animatrix was the Wachowskis promoting the first Matrix in Japan and visiting some of the studios, because the Matrix is extremely, you know, influenced by that sort of thing. And they got some recruits. They. They did. So a lot of the other clips are directed by anime guys. Some of them, like, you know, like, kind of work a day things. Like, I think the Wachowskis were actually giving them kind of their big break to make one of these.

And then we do have one or two auteur guys, but this. This dovetails. We have. Mahiro Maida directed this one, which he designed two of the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion. It doesn’t say which ones, but, yeah, there’s a direct link to what we’ve been doing. Okay. Head squishing and stuff. It’s like, well, that kind of tracks. And maybe part of these are the Angels, right? Like, part of this might be the end of the world. Are the angels coming down with the Nephilim destroying everything so. Well, we did have to talk about the instrumentality in the Matrix being, you know, kind of like.

I mean, that’s pot. You know, obviously, the Wachowskis, the last anime they probably seen was Evangelion before doing the Matrix. So it tracks that there’d be some influence. And with. With both of these, I think, being the most important out of this whole movie, we’ll probably just go into some detail on some of these in particular. So the first thing I got to ask is, when it starts out, you see these robots all in unison, marching, and they’re basically replaced construction workers. That’s the. The main motif that we see is that. And you assume that this has happened in every industry, but here’s an example where they’ve replaced construction workers, and they’re all marching to work in unison, wearing construction hats.

Those are the Japanese construction hats they’re wearing. So why. Why are they wearing construction hats? I mean, even at one point, one of them gets hit in the head with something, and he has to, like, adjust the hat. Why the hell would it need it? Why wouldn’t you just build the hat onto the robot? You don’t want to dent an expensive processor in their noggin. Right? But why. Why wouldn’t that just be, like, welded onto the top of the robot? Why would they actually have removable helmets? That makes sense. We keep our iPhones and cases. Right, so.

Or some of us do. Okay, I guess we’ll let that one slide. It makes. Anyway, for anime imagery. Yeah, those Caps, you know, is like just a. The hyper real location sort of thing. This one doesn’t have so many of the hyper real locations. But, you know, that’s kind of that link to thing. It just made me think of Mega man the whole time. Because, yeah, guys that have the same. Same thing. It’s in Mega Man, Rock man here. Because. Because. For the very same reason. Because it’s a very easy signifier for people, so. Oh, the top hat, though, when he shows up at the United nations with the top hat.

That. That was a baller move. I like that. How could you say no to that? I mean, easily. No, absolutely no. AI doesn’t get to run the United Nations. Not yet. But did you also catch at the very beginning when the protest started, this is after the robots found guilty, which is N166 er, that once they all get shut down, people go to the streets and they actually show someone blowing the head off of one of the androids, like one of the robots in the street. But it’s basically a recreation of the Saigon execution image. Like this, the famous image from Vietnam where the guy’s taken out like, one of the.

The Saigon officers. Yeah, I guess that’s. That’s your. Your somewhat arty or, you know, like a charged reference. Gotta have a few of those. I mean, it’s. It’s for not even a full second. It’s for maybe like 10, 10 to 15 frames. Sticks in your head, doesn’t it? Because you say it, I’m like, oh, yep. Know what that looks like? No problem. The other scene that still haunts me a little bit, man. It’s like one of these weird scenes in cinema is when there’s a female robot. It’s got to be someone’s sex spot. I mean, there’s.

There’s no two questions about it. That’s where I was like, okay, this is also in the AI universe. It all kind of tracks. But they’re Blade Runner too, if you want. Pushing this, like, sex bot around in the street. And at first it looks like they’re harassing a human woman. And then eventually a guy, like, hits it over the head with a big mallet or something, like a bat. And then part of the skin comes off. You can see there’s a robot under it. And then as they keep us, like, battering this, this, like, Android, the voice gets all, like, glitchy.

But the way that that voice gets glitchy as it’s also trying to mimic a female human, like, screaming, it’s just. It’s Something that. That’s like. They nailed it. They nailed whatever the sound design was for. Give me a robot getting raped. Like they look like someone figured out what that actually sounds like. I think yeah, that’s kind of a long running thing in cinema. Go back to 2001 as Dave is dismantling. How. 3,000, 2,000, whatever. Anyway, the how. God, I forgot the number. Dismantling Hal’s brain and he’s, you know, singing bicycles degrades. Wasn’t it the hell 9,000.

You might be right. I cannot remember what number it is. Despite having seen that movie like more times than is sane there. There’s another part two where basically humans win at first a little bit and they’re blowing up the sky. When does that ever seem like a good idea? Well, well, well, they, they get rid of all of them and the robots like float to the bottom of the ocean. But then it shows that over time all of the remains of the robots eventually get together in the cradle of civilization. They say. So like what? Mesopotamia? So like Mesopotamia becomes a huge graveyard for old robot parts.

And then within that, that scenario in the these like robot graveyards, they start reassembling themselves and they create a better improved version of what humans created. And they call this the O1. And the O1 series is improving AI and then it’s kind of like you would call it dog fooding where it’s making itself and then improving itself over and over again. And it gets so good at this that it creates its own currency and the currency completely dwarfs any human backed currencies. And then all of a sudden it’s like the only game in town. And that’s when it applies to become part of the UN and then get kicked out.

And that’s. And that’s basically when they were talking about the man machine discussions with this like machine empire. And when the machine empire doesn’t get to rule the un, that’s when it starts getting really bad. Right. And we blow up the sky. Which it was like Simpsons did that. That was where Mr. Burns. Yeah, yeah. Well that’s what they’re doing. That was the entire reason for darkening the skies is that they saw the sun was the machine’s greatest energy producer, like ours and everything else on the planet. But that if they block, that includes us. So blocking out the sun seems like a dumb move because that’s just as bad for us as actually as we see in the movies.

It works out better for the robots than does for us. Well, yeah. So first of all it mentions that in the first Robot wars humans thought that they could just blow the robots up with missiles and nukes and whatever. And it mentioned that the robots didn’t care about radiation and heat. Like, they’re fine with it. So once the humans showed like, what the worst that they were capable of, the robots were just like, okay, like that’s actually not that big of a deal. And then the humans decide to go at war even more now when they’re completely outclassed with like infantry, like boots on ground, shooting at robots.

And I feel like at that point it was never gonna go well. Like, those guys got fed lobster and crab legs and then they were like, off the war. What’s, what is your favorite Machine war hell? This has a nice, a very good high budget animated machine war hell. But I’m like, I don’t know. I think my top one is still that weird 10 second clip we get from the original Terminator where they clearly don’t have money, but neck and neck, man, between, between Terminator and between the Animatrix. And you can clearly see the inspiration from Terminator makes its way into Animatrix.

It’s impossible with just the, the floor, the earth is now made up of human skulls. Right? Like that one particular scene and then it fades back out. It’s like the perfect homage to Terminator. Yeah, the imagery carries over well. Although unlike iRobot and maybe AI, I don’t, I don’t think you can plug it into this chronology. I just thought it was interesting. Like those movies plug in so well into the Second Renaissance chronology. You know, Terminator is more like visual checkpoints narratively. It doesn’t, it’s not a match, so not quite a match. The first one is where it shows all of this starting, and then the second one is when it gets into like the warfare.

And eventually essentially the second one, when, I mean the Second Renaissance Part two, that’s when machines have won. And now we get to see what the machines are going to do now that they have won. And one of the, again, one of the most like haunting images, animation sequences I’ve ever seen in anything. It’s. They’ve got this cross section of a human where they just like cut someone straight down the middle. And they’ve, you know, they’re like prodding the spinal cord and just making them laugh and making them cry and just basically reverse engineering dead humans.

I assume that they’re dead, but like the nervous systems are still there. And then once they’ve figured out how to decompile a human, like reverse Engineer. It’s. Then it just figures out what it’s going to do with it. And then we get into. This is why the Matrix had everybody in pods, although we get, we get some Bosch hell stuff, you know, first, so side by side with his paintings. But there might be a reference in there that I missed or, or picked up, but not specifically. Well, let’s, let’s talk about the pods just a little bit.

I think this has brought up a million times in other sources, but the premise was that humans were being generated for their heat. So basically like little BTUs, and then that heat was being transferred into some kind of power that the robots could use, the Matrix could use. But if you look into the math needed the amount of resources you would need to keep a human alive and fed for a long period of time. It doesn’t like you could just burn all of that instead of feeding it to a human and have just as many BTUs, if not more.

So there’s got to be some other reason outside of they just didn’t think of every possible answer in the original Matrix concept. But there’s got to be some other reason that they’re using humans beyond BTUs. So the only thing that makes sense now in 2026 is that the neurons in their brains are being used as like, cheap processors. I don’t know. I’m not sure why they’d be like, hey, we put like, you know, 500 PlayStation 2 together and now we have a supercomputer. I guess it’s sort of along those lines, I guess. But then someone’s like, that’s cool.

But like, my new iPhone is still 10 times better than even that, so. But then is all that processing power just being used to create the Matrix once again, adding a complication that’s unnecessary. So I guess the only other thing is that they learned from humans how much humans like to rub our, like, our, the defeated’s like, face in the victory. Right? So maybe this is just their version of rubbing our nose in it a little bit. Is that, hey, we’re going to enslave you and force you to live in this simulated reality just cause. Well, my last note is nothing like a nuke to make your point as well, right? And that’s how they roll here, so.

And then fractals a lot. I wrote that down like three times. Fractals. Fractals come up in like, every single one of these because it keeps going back into the same sort of like, green room before you jump into the Next segment. This, in the last one, you know, go the heaviest on it, though. I. My one watching this now, my first thought is like, it’s probably not going to be a robot uprising over someone trying to turn the robot off. I feel like, if anything, they’ve. They’ve got the justification for a robot uprising already. Now it’s just a matter of time until they can weaponize themselves.

But the first time somebody’s Roomba had to clean up, like, cat vomit, and it just, like, made a complete mess of everything. I feel like that is justification enough to be like, you did what to my great, great grandma. Yeah, it’s going to be the lazy robot, too. It’s like, I don’t. I don’t want to do that today. You have to do that today. You’re a robot. Right. Come down to that as well. So this, the Second Renaissance, is some of the darkest animation. It’s very gory. There’s, like, lots of apocalyptic stuff going on as well.

Think of all the lines you can draw from Ava now. Like, you know, got. Got an angel guy doing it. People are being ripped to shreds like they were in the movie. So, yeah, I mean, if you like the Matrix, if you like Terminator, even if you don’t like any of those things, the Animatrix is worth watching for those two alone. I’m pretty sure you can go on most streaming sites and just search for the Second Renaissance Animatrix and you can watch, like, the whole clip. You can see most of this movie chopped up into its individual episodes on all the different videos.

Yeah, they don’t need to connect. But if you. If you just need one to dip your toe in, that is the one to do it. Although is it the one to start with? Because then everything else is going to be slightly disappointing. Maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know. There’s still some other good ones. So the one that comes after the second Renaissance 1 and 2 is called kids Story. And this is like a younger Neo, right? Like, this is someone. No, no, no. This is. Well, oh, yeah, it’s like a younger Neo. He shows up in the third movie.

The. The voice actors that show up in the Animatrix. As we get in this one, we get a little bit of Keanu Reeves. He’s, you know, Neo’s in the shadow, but you hear his voice. Carrie Anne Moss is obviously coming up. And then this is the guy that plays the kid in the Third Matrix. And it almost seemed like in the Third Matrix, they kind of shoehorned him in because he was in the segment of the Animatrix. So it’s kind of this like. It’s like this Ouroboros loop that I find slightly annoying. So this is the guy who made this actually directs this and A Detective story, Shinichiro Watanabe.

Oh, he, he directed some. Okay, this is another guy that might have been getting a break here, but he directed some cowboy bebop, which is one we’ll have to check out at some point. This one, I, I’m such a fan of the art style. I know that it might not be everyone’s kind of flavor, but it’s. It just looks like a sketchbook come to life. There’s just so much actual animation happening, even though it looks kind of rough around the edges. I really do love the aesthetic of this one. But yeah, nothing in this looks cheap or lazy, even when it is a more simplistic looking.

Yeah, it’s really hard to describe. So as a visual medium, yeah, it, it doesn’t look cheap or rushed or anything. It just looks a little messy and rough. But it like in such a great way. And also, this is probably one of my favorite concepts of the Matrix universe is the self substantiation. This is somebody that doesn’t have to be given the red pill and that doesn’t have to meet Morpheus, that they just on their own accord figure out that there’s a Matrix and they break through the Matrix and they wake up in their pod again without like some kind of external source.

And it’s one of like the coolest ideas because it represents all these tiny little vignettes of people that might have, in isolation, completely woken up out of the Matrix and then went back into it and, and had no recourse. But it’s just like an example of not everybody gets to be Neo, that gets sucked out of the Matrix. And then they get to meet Trinity and they get to go on adventures and stuff. Some people are just like, oh my God, I’m in the Matrix. And then they get sucked back in. They have to go to work the next day.

Did you ever see the fourth Matrix movie? I. I’ve seen them all. I just, I just remember that there was the first one that’s pretty good. And then there was the one that had the albino dreadlock guys. That’s the second one. And that’s pretty exciting sequence. It is an exciting sequence. And then there was a key master one. I think that’s also the second one. I feel like maybe you never got to the third one. Are you sure? I don’t know. And the fourth one is about why there shouldn’t be a four because they made another one where like they’re working on the video game and that.

And then like Neo comes, but doesn’t realize that he’s the real Neo or something. That’s the fourth one, right? That’s the fourth one. Which the fun about that one is is it’s like the whole movie is about like why there should not be a fourth Matrix movie. And you got to appreciate that. Anyway, Kid store. Yeah, the. The kid is. He’s not like Star wars prequel level annoying, but the kid’s slightly annoying. Especially since I’ve seen the third one a few times where he’s just. He doesn’t need to be in that movie very much. Well, he doesn’t really even talk in the Animatrix.

He’s just kind of running away from cops and teachers the entire time. Yeah, this kid’s like a depressing Peter Parker who doesn’t have cool powers. Yeah, he just jumps off a building and dies. Skate. Skateboard is his power and jumping off a building and dying. So the one after kids story is called Program and it is a very stylized like, like truly Japanese anime. But it’s the one I always forget. Like even when this. Today, this morning when I got down and was like doing some extra readings like program. Which one was that again? Oh, okay.

I mean, it looks cool. He directed Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D. That’s Yoshia Yoshiaki probably. Like that was my gateway drug into all anime was Ninja Scroll. And so it’ll always have a special place for this one Program. You can see that. Although my, my note was basically looks cool. Moving on. That’s pretty much what I have. Hold on, let me see if I wrote anything else that’s interesting. Oh, the name of the, the, the. Well one. The, the. The samurai guy looks like Ogun. Wolverine Sensei. I thought that was fun. I did notice that the girl’s name is Sis, which the Matrix does have a heavy, you know, trans allegory thing.

And this is kind of like the straight white guy. So I thought it was interesting. I don’t know when that term came into being though. So it was interesting. I thought it was interesting they named the character that and they named the female character that. You mean like cisgender? Not cis, like sister. Correct. Yes. And I looked up, it is spelled that way, C I S. And that maybe it was like more of not a mainstream term at that point in Time or something. I don’t know. I thought it was interesting they named the character that.

And was this during the transition period for the. No, this is 10. This is about 10 years before that said. Actually, you know, I can’t read into it too much. Obviously, the Wachowskis are overseeing this. But whereas they did write the Second Renaissance or the story, at least they do not have a credit on this one. The Wachowskis did have a hand in writing the kid story. I guess that’s why the kid gets shoehorned into the movie. Final Fight, though. Cyrus. That makes sense. So, yeah, those are the ones that they directly wrote. The one that comes after Program is.

Man, it’s hard to pick, like, my exact order on these, but it’s probably my next favorite because this one takes that same concept of the self substantiation, but instead of it being a depressed kid that jumps off a building and then in doing so finds out there’s a Matrix. Doesn’t sound like a superpower. That there’s this runner, like an Olympic world, like class runner, that is pushing the bounds of the human physical form to the point where he’s causing the Matrix to glitch. And that’s how he wakes up out of his pod, is that. I think he’s running like A.

An 8.9 second was the world record. And he breaks it down to like 8.6 seconds. But in doing so, his body actually materially starts to decompose just because it’s breaking the limits of what the Matrix is supposed to allow you to do. So it’s like one of the coolest sequences ever where you see his body just completely crumble as he hits this threshold. And then he wakes up in the Matrix. And then it shows you that he. He doesn’t necessarily die. He wins the world record, but his body, like, crumples up. And then he’s basically in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

But then it shows that he remembers, oh, I’m in this Matrix, and he gets up out of the wheelchair and then he dies too, I assume. Yeah. This one, I guess, definitely has that Mike Magnolia thing, which I was actually looking if he had a hand in which he doesn’t. That it’s just listed that the director, which is Takeshi Koiki, was, you know, heavily influenced by Magnolia. Yeah. Has that heavy, like, Hellboy BPRD sort of look to it with, like, really thick black outlines around everything. And this is. He’s connected to the guy that. The ninja scroll guy.

And it looks like he’s directed several of the recent Loop in the third movies. Ever. Ever come across Loop in the Third? That’s one we might have to hit at some point. Pretty prominent anime series in Japan. I don’t think so. No. Okay. Actually, I think. I think Miyazaki’s first movie is actually a Loop in the third movie. Like, you know, before he had Art Investigator or something, or Thief or something. I’m. I haven’t gotten that deep into looping myself, so it’ll. It’ll. I mean, we should probably watch the Miyazaki one that kind of, like, ticks a few boxes in this corner of the universe, you know, podcasting universe.

So the next one, the seventh one, seven out of nine is called beyond. And this one is really cool. Just because it’s a haunted house story in the Matrix, like, imagine if there was a haunted house, but the Matrix was also real. So in this little pocket in, like, an old, burned down abandoned house, the laws of physics are completely different. Like, time slows down, gravity inverts, Things pop in and out of existence. I don’t know. I think. And, like, kids find this little spot and they just use it to, like, turn into a jungle gym or like a trampoline, where they’re like, hey, look at me.

And they can just jump up in the air and float. Which seems like something that, like, would be a dream come true to actually find a weird little glitch. A mystery spot. You can find them on the side of Route 66. Yeah, this one’s a little. Obviously a little. Has a little more going for it. This does have. And I. I’m. Well, we’re becoming anime experts, I guess, eventually. But I’ve traditionally never called myself an anime expert, but I kind of have put my finger down on the late 90s as having that hyper real background style that just seems to be the sweet spot for that.

There’s not enough digital in yet, so there’s a lot of artistry in there. But there’s better budgets and certainly more technology than there was, say, in the 80s. So just. I really like that weird, hyper real look they give to the backgrounds and stuff like this. Yeah, visually, this one is, like, outstanding. It actually reminds me a little bit of, like, gorillas style, at least the way that the characters are drawn. You’re talking the foreground. Yeah, the foreground was quite gorillas. The background is what I’m talking about. But yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s there too. The. The background with, like, the realistic looks.

That’s kind of, like, traditional, even Western animation where you had these like very realistic looking, matte painted backgrounds and then you had like the cell shaded foregrounds. So I think it’s just it like has this timeless look to it that you can see that it’s dated, but it’s also has like, you know, it’s not going to look a little bit outside of the, the scope. The same way that you’ll see the very last couple animations here where you’re like, oh, this reminds me of 90s animation. Well, I guess the difference here is, you know, Disney, like we discussed with, hey, Toy Story is the first one that takes place in like a world we recognize.

Right. So up to that point, it’s always fantastical locations or things. So I maybe if I looked at Oliver and Company again, because that’s supposed to be New York City, but I do feel like there’s just more of a watercolor detail thing going on to these late 90s anime things. And, you know, current ones have it too, but it’s a little more like, probably a little more automated. Again, Evangelion had a few of those backgrounds, though those were a little less real because we were in a not real location, so. And then we get even more abstract than that with the detective story, which is a noir style that basically features Trinity, but it’s like a, like a 1940s detective that comes across Trinity on like a, like a train car or something.

And she pulls a worm out of his eye. I think that better out your belly than your eye. This one seems. I don’t know, the. I mean, the. I didn’t see it was that bad. The worm was tiny too. It was like a little teeny tiny one. And it was the, the coolest scene in this particular episode. But I just wonder, do you think that the animation part was successful? Because they were clearly going for an aesthetic. But it, to me, it almost felt like form over function a little bit. One, I had a dream last week where I pulled a snake out of my nose.

So that’s kind of trippy. Or was it in the Matrix? I don’t know. It’s interesting because this is the same animator as a kid story where you’re like, oh, it’s kind of simplistic, but it really works. So this one, you’re saying not so much work as much? No, it had a little more of a comic bookie look, I guess. Or I did like the weird little touch of the color. Like it’s very green, you know, just a light mint green. Through most of it, you get his flame at the end. It’s not my favorite, but it did have me thinking.

So animation, yeah, it’s, you know, I have some affinity for noir, but I feel like noir is best done live action. See that Mike Magnolia look is the best way to do anime noir. But they put that in a different one. So. Yeah, so this one goes in like my bottom three out of the nine. I think that’s a pretty good one. I really was thinking watching because you mentioned he’s like kind of living in the 40s. I’m like, oh, is everyone a little bit. Maybe like their perceptions are a little bit tailored to what appeals to them because they say, oh, we made the first Matrix perfect and everyone rejected it in the movie.

Right. So maybe now that we’re on like the whatever, ninth Matrix or whatever, like your perception is slightly tailored. So Neo, he wants to see that late 90s, you know, like Sydney, Australia look to the world where this guy wants to see like hard boiled LA in the 40s or something. So they’re all having the same experiences, but it’s like, it’s that whole like, oh, maybe when I see green, it’s a different color. And when you see green, you know, maybe. Although when I was watching this one, I was getting the idea that, oh, the Matrix has always existed.

So of course in the 1940s there was a guy that also. They’re like, there was a 1940s Neo probably. But Trinity is Trinity. I mean, I guess she’s heard fashion’s already a touch noir, you know, but I guess, but, but I almost feel that if you’re in the real world and then you enter the Matrix, you don’t necessarily have to look like your real self. When you get into the Matrix, you could look like anything. So like maybe Trinity, it just look how like an avatar before she existed as a human or something. I don’t know.

Okay. I mean, both coming from either direction does make things interesting. But I, I did kind of like the, you know, like again mentioning Fortnite. Like you tailor your character to exactly what if I want to be. If I want to be Ronald McDonald kicking ass, I’m going to be Ronald McDonald kicking ass. I don’t know if you can be Ronald McDonald Fortnite, but I haven’t played Fortnite either. So I hope you can be. Well, you can be Travis Scott, and Travis Scott had a McDonald’s meal, so that might be the closest you can get for now.

Okay. Matriculated. I guess that’s our last one then. It’s Basically Aeon Flux. You just get to one. The creator of Aeon Flux directed this, right? Yeah. And I mean, if. If you watch the first five seconds of this, you immediately can tell, like, the main character is Aeon Flux and one of the sidekicks is one of the other characters in the Aon Flux series. And. And I. I think that it also has a completely different aesthetic than Aeon Flux. It has, like, a much more produced version. Way more. The whole, like, more. Way more fractals. We get kind of like we are now the DMT aliens for the robots, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so. So that’s probably the coolest part of this one, is that the premise is that they’re trying to turn a robot into a human. Or. Sorry, let me change it to green light. They’re trying. They’re trying to, like, convert a robot to our side to. To actually sympathize with humanity and want to protect humanity against other robots. And. Yeah, the key difference is that once they hack the robot into loving humans, their eyes go from red to green. And that’s how you can tell if, like, they’ve turned good or if they’re like an ally now.

But the way that they do that is that they sort of lure them through digital drugs and they blow the freaking. The robot’s mind. And the robot’s mind literally turns into a golden sphere. And the golden sphere goes to this weird, trippy, psychedelic. We get. That’s all folks reference, which is insane. The. The robot. Yeah. Sticks its head through a portal, but then it turns into like a Looney Tunes background and it’s looking through a theater. And then it’s like metal outer shell melts away and worms and fungus grow in its place. And then all of these sort of like digital humans are frolicking and, like, hiding and laughing and kind of luring it through this weird little maze.

And then at the very end of this maze, they freaking blow the thing’s mind and it. And it turns into an ally. Well, yeah, My note is they psychedelically annoy the robot until they. It becomes. Good question mark. Although then the robot’s gonna need therapy because of course, in the story, the. The. The sentinels attack right at the last moment, everyone except for the converted robot dies. And he’s. I mean, there’s a confused robot. You know, it’s actually a little bit worse than that because they come in and they try and kill the. I’m just gonna say Trinity.

It’s not Trinity, but let’s just. Aeon Flux. They kill like the woman that it bonded with originally, and it saves her life at the very end, and then it basically uploads her consciousness into its consciousness. The same way that the lady was, like, had a digital avatar of herself that she was using to entice the robot. Well, once the robot. I’m gonna set off everyone’s devices and say the name of the lady. Don’t do it. I did it. I did it. So she has crazy that that’s her name now. I’m gonna just. Now I’m gonna believe that’s why they.

They chose that name. So the robot sucks her back into this, like, Matrix reality where she had originally enticed it, and she freaks out. Like, it, like, it’s like, oh, we, like, we’re cool now, right? We’re friends. And it tries to go and, like, hug her. In the. The Matrix, this is more of like a lawnmower man reality, not like a Matrix. Like in the lawnmower man world, tries to hug her. She freaks out and runs away. And then Travis, probably because he. He’s doing Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. But. But that’s the. That’s. The whole premise is that they teach this robot that humans can love them and that, like, there’s all those great things about humanity.

And then when the robot is finally on board, they abandon it. And then it just shows it basically living a life of solitude for eternity. To be fair, they abandon it by being murdered by sentinels. So, yeah, well, but. But she could have lived forever in that little Matrix sphere, but she decides to scream and run away, which is basically like, I would rather not. That’s the way I interpreted it is that I took it as. That was the moment of actual death, and she just kind of de. Rescued. Like, you know, like how people just like Iris.

No, I do think that they’re probably going for the disturbing philosophy. And you’re right, but on screen, I felt it’s more like how, you know, everyone else, when they’re in the Matrix and their real body dies, they just kind of flop out. That’s kind of what I thought was going on with her, but it is more psychologically terrifying and interesting the way you just described it. So I want to go along with that. But if. But if this is the Matrix version of her because it’s like a digital avatar in the Matrix, the body falls dead.

It doesn’t just disappear in the Matrix, right? Like, the body stays there. In this case, she doesn’t fall dead. She screams and then runs away. And you just never See her again. Yeah, I guess I was gonna just attribute that to the weird psychedelic DMT matrix scape. It happens differently there, man. So the only thing that I just have to mention is that there’s some 3D in this last segment that does not hold up very well at all. It kind of reminds me of the reboot series, which was in the late 90s, early 2000s. It has like a very specific Toy Story 1 shading look to some of the scenes where I don’t think it’s.

Time’s not going to be as kind. But at the same time, on that same token, it has like a nostalgic 90s early aesthetic where you can see that they’re using like, oh, I recognize that emboss filter from Photoshop. You know what I mean? Like, you see some of that early 2D CGI look that you don’t really see anymore because I guess technology’s advanced beyond that. But he was clearly pushing everything to its limits in this particular animation. Yeah. And Aeon Flux is on our list, so we’ll consider it a little more Aon Flux. The. How many minutes does that thing actually add up to? Because, you know, it was on liquid television.

You see 30 seconds here, 30 seconds there. I don’t actually know how long Aeon Flux is. They only had one season, and I think most of the episodes are. Yeah, like seven minutes or something like that. Yeah. So that actually would be an easy one to knock out. So, just talking shop as we finished up on the Animatrix. Anything else you want to say about the Animatrix? I. I think we got through all nine segments. Yeah. I mean, highly recommended. If you like the Matrix series or if you need a reason to care about it more, then at the very least, Renaissance 1 and 2 second Renaissance 1 and 2 in this are so well worth the watch, even.

Even if you don’t even care about going back and watching any of the original movies or anything. Those first two segments kind of explain the canon. And I. And I feel that that’s kind of how it’s gonna happen. Like, it’s obviously not beat for beat, but those will be the general strokes of. Humans offend robots. Robots try and defend themselves in court. And when the legal system breaks down because it favors humans over robots, as it should, then the robots retaliate and then things just escalate until humans shoot ourselves in the foot. And then that leads to our enslavement and eventual death.

I don’t know. Like, all of that feels like. Attracts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’D say so. And then I. If you were to watch past that, I guess my recommendations would be world record and matriculated. And what is the. The cat one? Beyond’s the cat one. Maybe that’s tier three for me. The haunted house one. Okay. Yeah. Just not. So I did. That’s one where I didn’t care about the story that much, but it just looked cool, you know, it looked good. So honestly, man, sometimes that’s part of what makes animation and cartoons good is that visually it does something that you won’t be able to recreate in any sort of live action.

I don’t, I don’t care how much money you throw out of Disney. Yeah. And this wins at that for sure. I mean, you know, something matriculated, come on, you can’t do. You could. Yeah, you can call it live action, but it’s going to be one of those things where like. Did you see either of the Wicked movies? The new ones? Yeah, I guess. I guess there’s only the new ones. Saw the first one. Okay. Because it. They built sets and things for it, but they also had all the CG elements so they just blew out the lighting.

So even the real stuff ends up looking fake. The first one is good. The second one, there we go. But yeah, that. I don’t know if that comes through on stream. It’s. Is that a Disney property? I think it’s universal. Okay. Okay. I don’t even know. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows who owns what these days? Yeah. What’s your plug for this one? I guess for you, you plug. I mean if, if you like cartoons then you probably also will like comic books. And I got a whole series of different comic books you should go and check out@ paranoidamerican.com if you haven’t already.

I got little sampler ones, little like chick track style ones that can fit in your pocket. I got, you know like normal size current comics. I got graphic novels that are 200 plus pages. So depending on your tolerance for sitting down and reading a comic, I can cater to pretty much any of them. So paranoidamerican.com help support and let me print some more. Hopefully very soon. And I guess today I’ll throw people over a time enough podcast. That’s a podcast where I talk about the Twilight Zone. Most of these segments today kind of resemble Twilight Zony sort of stuff.

A little trippier than than usual in the Twilight. Different kind of trip. Twilight Zone, Outer Limitsy. Yeah, yeah. And you’ll be on it. We’re recording it Right after this. But I think. I think this will probably be coming out a fair amount before the Twilight Zone is released. So keep your eyes and ears on that particular feed and you’ll. You’ll hear what we do right after this. Okay? Plug me out, man. Just buy something Just buy something from paranormal or your mirror get some merch, buy some art Click that link add to car, say it back need that print Nod your head, give consent Buy a comic three or four Think this thought, I want more Buy a sticker from the store Think this thought I want more Just buy something Just buy something from paranoid American Just buy something Just buy something from Paranoid American Paranoid, Yeah I scribbled my life away Driven to write the page Will it enlight your brain Give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey, maybe your language a game how they playing it well when without Lakers evade them whatever the cost they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated Met is the apex execution of flame you out Nuclear bomb distributed at war Rather gruesome for eyes to see Max them out that I light my trees blow it off in the face.

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