Category: OVAs and Movies:

Okay. That was amazing.

The Second Renaissance Part II has definitely been the best of the nine shorts of The Animatrix. I think this is because of its highly disturbing material. In the previous part, we saw the humans abusing the machines, now we see the machines, taking everything away from the humans, killing most of them off and placing the rest into cocoon-like containers, in order to get their energy. But I never could have imagined that it was this gruesome and intimidating…

We continue where we left off. The robots began to wage war on humans, taking over human territories. Then, the humans came with their most desperate plan yet: sealing off the sky. They used a huge amount of planes, disposing huge amounts of a strange gas into the atmosphere, closing off the earth from all sunlight, the machines’ main source of power. Afterwards, the humans planned to wage one huge war against the weakened machine.

Still, they weren’t weakened enough. What follows is a number of horribly disturbing scenes, in which the machines gradually kill off human soldiers in some rather disturbing ways. Humans didn’t stand a chance. Hospitals became overly crowded. The machines seemed to have studied the humans bodies. After they had won the war, they started experimenting with the surviving humans in order to use the power from the human body. The final cities of the humans were destroyed, and each human was converted into The Matrix.

This short indeed was as awesome as it’s rumoured to be. It’s really been a while since I saw such huge shocking images in anime. Heck, even in regular movies and television. And just when I thought that Beyond was chockfull of symbols. As this is a documentary, the screen is so full of all kinds of references, symbols, analogies, et cetera. Awesomeness.

Very interesting, a documentary. It’s the first time the art style isn’t easy to define. It’s a mix of CGI frames with rather common character designs. Most of the time we see robots doing their thing, and we don’t really see that many humans.

In any case, this documentary explains how The Matrix originated, why the robots took over control and more background information behind The Matrix. It’s a rather gruesome tale, which makes clear that humanity indeed got what it deserved. This film has been split in two, so the last remaining one will end this story.

In the beginning, humans constructed robots, and the robots fully obeyed the humans. The robot design was rather unrealistic, but it does bring over the point. The robots possessed AI, and they were treated rather badly. Still, entire armies of robots kept working for the humans, doing all of the hard, harsh and dirty jobs.

Then, one robot stood up against its master, and killed him and his entire family. Because of this, humans got scared, and tried to dispose of the robots. What followed was a huge war in which the robots were shamelessly killed off in huge masses. People became to hate the machines. With passion. What follows is a couple of scenes showing the graveyards for these robots. It’s not funny when you realize how many of these were dumped. Entire ocean floors were filled with their corpses.

The surviving machines fled, in order to start a nation of their own, somewhere in Arabia. They called their nation “Zero-One”, or 01. They began to live a life of their own, improving their own AI and equipment. They then attempted to coexist with humans, and participate in the world economy. However.

The leaders of the humans, with their power degrading, didn’t feel anything for cooperation with the robots, who still had good intentions at that time. The robots, attempting to be recognized were killed off. What happens afterwards, we learn in the second part of The Second Renaissance.

Yet again, we’ve got lots of symbolism in this movie. The robots have been given a uniform and human-like design, like in most ancient robot movies. It’s not really realistic when you look at today’s huge diversity of machines. But by giving these robots human characteristics, this film does manage to give them a uniformity. Because of this, things don’t get unnecessarily complicated. And it also provokes some sympathy for these robots, like Matriculated tried to do. I’d say that The Second Renaissance managed to do this better than Matriculated.

Huge exterminations, like shown here, have occurred more often in the history of humanity, at times, even more extreme than this one. Most mass murderers never really got their equal payback (Incans vs. Spain, anyone?). This time, however, payback in the most extreme form arrives. Still, the fact does remain that people uninvolved got their payback as well. I guess that’s inevitable.

The question remains whether what the robots did was the right thing. After all, they were heavily abused, and revenge is sweet. Apparently, even for robots. Still, both the humans and the robots were wrong in this case. The humans for abusing the robots, and the robots for going through the extreme measures of locking the humans up. What happened to love and peace, everyone?

The best art style so far: Studio 4C style! When you combine this with 3D and a big budget, it works out great. Beyond really is a feast for the eyes. Most companies need to understand that there’s more than flashy graphics, 3D, lots of realism and lots of CGI in order to make great graphics. You need to add something special for that. Good Witch of the West understood this, Noein understood this and now Beyond also understands this.

The story this time is about a glitch in the matrix. Somewhere, in an old abandoned house, the laws of physics have been rather messed up. A group of kids and one teenager have discovered this, and are having the most fun they’ve ever had in their lives, playing with these laws. Unfortunately, the men in suits have tracked down this error. They rush into the site with a huge truck, close off the area, take the kids away and repair the error. The children return afterwards, but they find that their playground has been destroyed.

Lots of symbolism in this movie. Take for example, the kid’s playground which gets destroyed. That’s happening at more places in the world. At some places, children can have so much fun playing with each other, while adults can’t see this, and plan to use the playground to build, like, an office. But not only that, you can also link this to animals. At the end of the movie, you see rats, who’ve been living inside the haunted house, fleeing from the men in suits. At the moment, things like these still are a major news item with the rarer animals, like tigers and rhinos.

I also found it interesting that we’ve got a bunch of kids who know about the glitch, and they decide to tell our main character, a teenager, about this. In most stories like these, it’s something that the children only know about. It’s interesting to see someone have fun with children 8 years younger than her, like it’s nothing. Talk about symbolism.

Overall, along with World Record, this has been the best story so far. World record had its very intense plot and very interesting main character while Beyond has its incredibly imaginative visuals and deep symbolism. All that’s left now is The Second Renaissance, which is rumoured to be the best of the bunch (I’ve indeed been saving that one for last, in order to save the best for last. ^^)

Program was very interesting. The art style this time resembles that of old japanese samurai-anime. If you combine this with the extremely fluent animation and choreography, the result turns out interesting.

We’ve got a woman, inside a mini-matrix. Another guy comes up, and challenges her for a spar. He then makes a confession to her, while he has blocked the signal so nobody can hear him. He plans to go back to the matrix. The woman doesn’t agree. She can’t turn back from the truth. The two make a small chase, after which the woman kills the guy. In the end, it appeared to be a test for her, to see whether she’d react in the right way. The woman isn’t really happy with it.

The interesting point of this film is the emotional effect the matrix can have on a person. The guy appeared to be a simulation, but when you’re in the matrix, or mini-matrix in this case, you won’t notice. A program was created so, that it would look like the guy she knew in every single way. If that’s the case, how ever can you recognize whether that guy is a fake? In normal anime, people often recognize this because they feel something different, or that their heart knows that they’re being deceived. But the fact remains that the matrix can create these feelings.

Program also had a few claustrophobic moments. The program tells the woman that he’s blocked the signal. When she starts screaming for help, nobody reacts because of this. It must be quite a scary feeling, when you always know that you can escape a “dream”-world because of your comrades. I think that that’s a reason for people to be calm in situations like these. It must be a huge shock to find out that you don’t have a means of returning to the real world. Especially if someone’s about to kill you.

Overall, it isn’t the best. It has yet to reach the brilliance of World Record. Still, it was an interesting watch. The fights also were well-coordinated and full of details, though I admit that they lacked a bit in creativity.

Ah, CGI. Yet another style of animation, totally different from the others. This, however, doesn’t really mean that Final Flight of the Osiris is good. It’s actually the worst film so far.

See, the problem with Final Flight of the Osiris is that it has awesome graphics, but zero substance. Basically, what happens is a man and a woman are inside a mini-matrix, sparring with swords in sexy outfits when their ship suddenly gets attacked by robots. The rest of the film basically features lots of guns fired at these robots and the robots getting inside the ship and destroying it, causing as much explosions as possible in the process.

The action scenes it features also aren’t very exciting. The fight in the mini-matrix is basically two people stipping each other’s clothes off. The sound effects also made no sense at all. Swords cut way too easily through air. And even though the choreography looks interesting, it remains uninspired. The robots attacking the ship also aren’t very worthwile. Basically, we see lots of guns shooting and robots crawling, but nothing that looks impressive.

Also, sorry for the lack of screenshots. I played this one in a weird format which doesn’t support screenshots, and I only managed to take one of them before my computer started acting weird. And I’m not exactly motivated to spend time to this one.

Yet another style: a film noir. Like any proper film noir, everything’s in black and white. The art style is the most realistic one yet. It isn’t as overly pointy as in Matriculated, or as overexaggerated as in World Record. And certainly not as messy as in Kid’s Story. Everything also seems to have gotten a noise filter.

The story is about a detective who accepts a case to look for Trinity. He gathers a bit of information, and then realizes that there’ve been more detectives on the same case. One killed himself, one went missing and one went crazy. The latter keeps claiming that Trinity isn’t real. The detective then continues to search through chatrooms and cafes, frequented by hackers. At one point, he finds a certain Red Queen, who happens to be Trinity.

Trinity sends the message to him that in order to meet her, he’ll have to jump the first of six brooks. This appears to be a train. Inside the train, he sees Trinity. She reckons that he might be able to make it. The entire assignment seems to have been a test for him, to see whether he would make it. She then puts some kind of machine on him, and extracts something out of his eye. It’s the same thing they tried to poison Neo with in the movie, I think.

Then a couple of men in suits appear, and chase after them. However, the detective himself begins to change into one of these men. Trinity then shoots him. Then the two of them talk a bit, and Trinity escapes.

To be honest, I didn’t really like this one. It felt like a bit too fast, and the references were all lost on me. First of six brooks? He talks about a certain Alice who jumps the second brook to get her into the woods. Alice jumps the first brook and then she boards a train. Who the heck is this Alice, why does she jump brooks, why are a number of streets highlighted on the map? How does he know which train to catch? In fact… what is a brook anyway?

I think that this film was a bit too short for its own good. I think it would be better if it borrowed some time from Matriculated. In the end, the case is interesting, though the other three films were thought-provoking. This one, however, wasn’t. I don’t seem to have any inspiration because of it.

Whoa… this was actually quite interesting. Quite interesting indeed. It’s most definitely the best of the three films I saw so far. I’m impressed.

The art this time looks totally different once more. It seems like the overall picture had to endure a filter which darkened all of the colours, making it a grey world. Not quite like Matriculated, though. The backgrounds are a bit more simple than before. The faces of the characters aren’t pointy like in Matriculated, though neither as round as in Kid’s Story. It’s more like they’ve turned square. The animation is a combination of the smoothness in Marticulated and the distorted anatomy of Kid’s Story. The art remains fluid and crisp at all times, though.

The story’s another awakening. In Matriculated, an enemy machine got converted to join the human’s side by own will. In Kid’s Story, Neo sends messages to a kid, who awakens afterwards after seeing the truth. This time, we’ve got a case in which the main character awakens on his own strength. In mere eight minutes, the creators managed to deliver something extremely fascinating.

We see an athlete, getting for the world championships 100 metres while a narrator voice explains the background of the story. The runners stand ready, and the start shot is given. We then see a flashback, in which the same guy seems to have made the newspapers in breaking the world record in the preliminaries of the same contest. He managed to get right under 9 seconds (8.99 seconds, to be exact). However, gossip about him using dope are circulating around. Dan, the main character, claims that these are untrue in a phone call to his father.

Meanwhile, Dan lifts off. What follows is some scenes of him, running in slow-motion. This looked kind of creepy. Then, another flashback. This time with his coach. It seems that Dan has worked too much, causing his muscles to be at the limit of bursting. When this happens, his athlete-career is over. The coach is keen on stopping Dan, though Dan wants to run, no matter what. It seems that he wants a final chance to prove everyone wrong who’s been claiming that Dan’s old record was impossible to beat. The coach then abandons him. Or so it seems.

Back to the race, Dan begins to look more creepy by the minute as the animation keeps getting more and more distorted. We then see a journalist, looking at him. Another flashback: the night before the race. The journalist meets up with him, in an attempt for an interview. Dan claims that it releases you from your world. That you become totally free.

Back to the race, Dan’s leg is beginning to show signs that it can’t take much more. This is expressed quite graphically. While gross in one viewpoint, it did add up to the intensity of the scene at another viewpoint. Then, one of his legs gives up, and the muscles inside of it break, causing quite a graphical shock. He however, continues to run, even though his leg has given up. He actually continues running, and surpasses every other runner. This shows signs that he’s about to awaken.

Meanwhile, the men in suits have arrived yet again. They have to stop him from awakening at all costs, and some of the nearby runners also reveal to be men in suits, attempting to stop him. This however, fails. This is even more motivation for the guy to reach the finish line. In the end, right before he reaches it, he awakens in his cell. A robot sees this, and forcefully puts him back to sleep.

Back to the race, Dan crosses the finish line, falls and crashes. He managed to break the world record: 8.72 seconds. A quick shot of the matrix shows him fainting. We then switch to the hospital, in which Dan is in a wheelchair, being pushed by a nurse. He’s holding a couple of walnuts, though his face shows that he’s lost the motivation for everything.

Then, we hear the men in suits evaluate Dan’s case, as they see him in his wheelchair. It’s an interesting case, though they reckon it’s nothing to be concerned about. He’ll live in his shell for the rest of his life, not doing anything. His memory has been erased and he’s got quite a souvenir left from it, a world record nobody will be able to beat.

Dan then surprises everyone when he suddenly utters the word “free”. He then stands up, continuing to utter the word “free”. The walnuts he dropped begin to move on their own. Dan attempts to float a bit, until he collapses and the film ends.

It’s quite shocking that World Record features a guy, being treated in a way like this. His body and mind get destroyed throughout this film, though I think that that’s the reason it works. Especially when, after all the hardships his mind endured by both the machines as the men in suits, he still continues remembering what he saw. This just shows how complex a human mind is. When humans are ignorant, they’re easy to control. Though something goes wrong in this when they’ve set their minds to something. Especially the stubborn people. I guess that it isn’t easy to just forget “the truth” after you saw it with your own eyes.

I also liked the shortness of this movie. Both Kid’s Story as Matriculated dragged on a bit. World Record, however, felt like it had fully utilised every second of it. This makes Dan even more intriguing. We know almost nothing about him. Right now, I feel like I want to know more about him. And that’s actually in a good way. I think that, because the creators decided to focus on this case, and this case alone that it worked so well.

The audio-department also was a major plus. Matriculated did this below average. I can’t even remember whether they actually had sounds at this point. Kid’s Story featured interesting background music, especially during the chase. It contributed to the scenes, though it wasn’t anything special. World Record, however, made excellent use of the available background tunes. Changing from fast-beat techno for the race itself to psychedelic, apocalyptic tunes for the moments at which Dan saw the truth, they fitted perfectly.

The only point at which World Record looked clearly inferior to the other two? The background art. Especially Kid’s Story features high-quality background art, which are quite stunning to see. Matriculated also played with this in an interesting way. Not to mention the psychedelic surroundings. In World Record, however, the backgrounds are kept simple. Very simple.

Matriculated is entirely different from Kid’s Story. Especially in terms of art, animation and style. While Kid’s Story had really messy animation, everything is moves extremely fluid n Matriculated. The extremely messy drawings have made way for a strange, futuristic-like look on one side, and very colourful, psychedelic CG-scenes on the other side. In this case, literally.

The story takes place outside of the Matrix. It deals with a group of rebels, one woman in particular. The overall air is dark, making the drawings fit quite well in their surroundings. The woman runs into a couple of robots: runners. They’ve got quite original designs, moving with extremely thin legs. In any case, after a small chase, the woman takes out both of the runners, and one of them gets taken to the camp of the rebels.

The goal of these rebels is to attempt to convert this machine to their side. Not by reprogramming it, but making it join their forces out of its own will. They do this by connecting both themselves as the runner to a Mini-Matrix (how did they call these again?). They get brought into a psychedelic world, in which an illusion is given to the runner that it can rely on the rebels. It’s quite interesting to see how they managed to do it. Slowly, the machine changes from machine into a humanoid-shape. We follow the runner, as it tries to make sense out of the virtual world. In the end, it gets converted.

Though then, it seems that reinforcements have arrived. It seems that the runner, before it was defeated, called for backup. This backup now has found the rebels’ main quarter, and are starting to destroy everything and everyone. In the end, the intruders get destroyed, but the price for this is high. The runner aids in fighting the intruders. When all is finished, the runner is the only one left standing, with the woman badly hurt, as the only survivor. The runner plugs the two of them back in the Mini-Matrix, in the hope of saving her. Inside, however, the woman is terrified when she sees the runner. So terrified, that she flees, and dies.

It’s indeed quite sad to see the woman who tried to convert you, the woman you believed was nice and embraced you, scaring herself to death by seeing you, only minutes later. Also, the fact that AI can actually be converted by toying with their morals also is quite intriguing. It’s shown something fake, though its AI isn’t able to determine that it’s fake. That’s why it works. The style of this film also was quite appealing. Both the colourful, psychedelic scenes, as well as the dark, futuristic scenes looked stunning. Especially the fluid animation was quite impressive.

Still, the voice-acting was once again a problem. I don’t know whether it was my version of the video, or it was meant to be like that, but the voices sounded really vague, which didn’t really work. I also feel that this film dragged on a bit too much. Currently, its length is 16 minutes. It could easily have been brought back to just ten of these. I also only began to like the ending when I watched it for the second time. Dunno what caused that.

Overall, it was quite an interesting watch. I think I liked Kid’s Story a bit more, though. But that’s mostly because of the themes which were more appealing, and the interesting art style.

I’ve been taking a look at the shows which are to air during the Fall-Season, and I doubt that that will be an overall good season. Seriously, eight bishoujo-anime. Isn’t that getting a bit too much!? Apart from that, another majority of the shows seem to be either boring, or tasteless shounen stuff. That probably only leaves a few gems, which will probably be blogged. I’ll probably do a full preview of the fall-season at the August-Summary. In any case, most of the shows I’m blogging will be ending as the fall-season begins, which means more time to blog about some interesting anime which aired in the past. Not only Ayatsuri Sakon and Popolocrois, but also the interesting-sounding shows which I have yet to see and some more unknown gems. I’m also going to check out some of Studio 4°C. They’ve already proved that they can do awesome stuff by producing Mahou Shoujotai, and I’ve also noticed that they’ve got a certain unique art and animation style.

So I ran into the Animatrix. It’s a collection of nine short movies, regarding the Matrix. They’re all playing in the world of the Matrix. The interesting part is that it’s partially been written by american directors. Studio 4°C handled the animation, along with Madhouse and apart from that, several big names in the japanese anime-industry wrote/directed parts of it. I’ve only seen the first one of the Matrix-movies, but then again, it never stopped me from watching before. I also have no idea whether there’s any order at which you have to see the stories, so I decided to just randomly pick ones. The first is “Kid’s Story”.

The story’s like this: it follows the teenager named Michael Popper. He’s been having dreams, in which he fell from a height. Strangely enough, the dream feels more real that the life he’s currently living. Neo also seems to be sending messages to him. He then goes to school, and then it shows that he wants Neo to take him to the Matrix, as he keeps writing suggestive lines in his notebook (eg. “get me out of here”).

Then, his mobile phone goes off, in the middle of class. Needless to say that his teacher doesn’t like this, especially when Michael seems to be doing rather bad in his classes. When the phone goes off for the second time, even though Michael’s sure he turned it off, the teacher has had enough of it, and attempts to take away the phone. Michael picks up, and hears Neo. Apparently, dangerous men in black suits have come to get him, as he knows about the Matrix. Neo urges him to run away.

Michael then loses it, and runs away like crazy, making use of his skateboard, inside school, hurting countless of people and objects in the process. He eventually flees in the girl’s bathroom, and climbs outside a window. He then makes it to the top of the school building, though the men in black suits have already been waiting for him. He then drops himself from the same roof, with the message to Neo that he believes in the things he said. He then relives the dream he had, and hits the floor.

Everyone around him thinks he died, and he’s buried. People blame the fact that he was mentally unstable. That reality can be quite difficult to take for some people. This world must have been cold and alienating for such a boy. Meanwhile, outside of the Matrix, we hear Trinity’s voice. Michael begins to awaken. Trinity can’t believe that self-substantiation was possible like that. I think it means something like getting loose from the matrix without having to use the red pill.

The first thing noticable about this film is the unique art it features. It’s by no means pretty. It’s actually very messy. Some scenes really have look as if they were drawn by a pencil, and then colored. Overall, it does fit the mood, which is dark, grey and light at the same time. The action scene, in which Michael flees from everyone especially looked good. I really like action scenes in which the animation drops all boundaries, and continues with really messy art, and this was a great example of it.

The fact remains, however, that this anime is one of the few who has actually been made in english. This made the voices rather annoying, except for Neo and Trinity, perhaps. But that could be because they were voiced by their original actors.

The most interesting part of this short film was the reaction of the adults, at the end of the movie. They’re wrong, in a sense. They’re talking about reality, and how Michael couldn’t accept it. However, they’re the ones away from reality. Michael was the one who was trying to reach it. But the fact remains that they don’t know they’re in this fake reality. They’ve been told that the world they live in is real for their entire lifes. They never heard about anything close to the Matrix. The untruth, is truth for them.

Overall, this was an interesting watch. It’s also short, so I can’t say I was bored.