A collection of short animated films that take place in the Matrix universe, it includes some real gems as well as some real duds.
Final Flight of the Osiris was made by the folks who animated the Final Fantasy movie, and the CG is amazing, though the plot is a little weak. The Second Renaissance Parts I and II together form a history of the pre-machine world, and how they eventually took over— good stuff. Kid’s Story was decent, and supposedly ties in to the annoying kid who follows Neo around in Reloaded. Program deals with a training program gone awry, and is animated in a really slick way. After that is World Record which deals with a world record track runner somehow affecting the matrix… I didn’t quite get it. But Beyond was very cute, dealing with a girl looking for her lost cat in a “haunted” house where some things defied the laws of physics— obviously glitches in the matrix.
A Detective Story is probably my favorite in the bunch— a film noir style detective is tasked to find the hacker Trinity, and thought the plot is somewhat lacking (it seems like they tried to cram a half hour short into eight minutes), Shinichirô Watanabe infused it with the same sort of style he imparted to Cowboy Bebop. Great stuff. Last, and least, comes Matriculated. Humans capture some sort of machine, and try to change its mind to fight for humans instead. They do this by jacking it in to their little fake matrix which seems like something out of the mind of a guy who’s seen the Heavy Metal movie one too many times.
Overall, the good outweighs the bad. 4 stars.