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.
If you’re wanting to watch some symbolist anime try Evangelion or Oiishi’s movies, especially “beautiful dreamer” or “thenshi no tamago”(angel egg).