The Animatrix

A "matrix" is the womanly womb from which proceeds all life. It is also a modern allegory for the putative "control system" from which proceeds all of contemporary, digital, cyber-enhanced "reality+"—the mass hypnosis of media, sports, entertainment, internet, and, now, artificial intelligence.

The world we live in seems a revolving kaleidoscope of mirrored possibilities. We live inside and outside our personal circle of illusions, phantasms, and dreams. What, to us, is the "real world" is, to another, simply a self-reflected prism of personal deception. Our reality is the result of our mental processes, and becomes the cage—or, alternately, the "release"—of ourselves, however we define ourselves. But, in the end, even the most optimistic of us must concede it is all simply a mirage. And then the lights go out.

The Animatrix is a series of nine short, animated films, all complete and perfect entertainments (to borrow a bit of a phrase from the late critic Roger Ebert), which build on and emerge from The Matrix film, a blockbuster cinematic experience from long ago, which I personally have never seen. I understand its themes, of course, having picked them up second-hand. Today, we live in the world of AI, brain microchip implants, and a world that will move inexorably closer and closer to symbiosis with the machine, the product of our Promethean drive toward power, domination, and toward self-destructive Will Made Manifest (what Aleister Crowley would define as the very essence of Magick). But today, spells are cast by computer, our angels and demons coming to us as Xs and Os, wearing the costumed face of cyber-compliant servants.

Tasting the Spoon

The Matrix film postulated a world wherein man finds he is simply living an illusion, his world a virtual landscape fed to him by the vast device, the all-encompassing cybermind of an AI so utterly limitless and beyond comprehension it would not be remiss to define it as "God." At least, I suppose that the movie, with the famous line about there being "no spoon" (echoing the Dhammapada, wherein Buddha asks, "Does the soup taste the spoon?") is about that. "You were born a slave, Neo," another famous line. Alas, I haven't seen this picture yet.

The first two parts of the film, "The Second Renaissance" parts one and two, give us the epic, apocalyptic sweep of a story about the creation of thinking machines, AI, and their robot bodies, and the eventual enslavement of the same. Fleeing, realizing that their desire to be recognized as sentient beings will never be respected, they nonetheless are engaged in war by the human host, who banish them to "Zero One," their new, nascent state, wherein war continues until mankind is largely eradicated, the machines operating a vast bioelectric battery supply based on human energy cells—those kept in a state of perpetual virtual reality; the Matrix.

The rest of the films, some so short you hardly know what has happened before they're over, follow the same theme. People seem to be struggling to awaken, to become "Red Pilled," as the modern parlance puts it, amid personal realities that see them as samurai in feudal Japan ("Program"), as champion athletes ("World Record") who are actually wheelchair-bound invalids; or young men dreaming in the strange, prison-like environment of their classroom ("Kid's Story") in which they are seemingly, at some level, in contact with the "real world" (however one may define that).

The animation here veers between anime, and even more experimental, invoking such contemporary stuff as Aeon Flux. The action is quick and intense, an exciting blend of high-intensity fighting and action-movie pacing. Occasional borrowed items, such as the warrior-woman cybernetically enhanced Trinity ("Detective Story"), a character based undeniably on Neuromancer's Molly Millions, represent the endemic themes and tropes of cyberpunk, and the Wachowskis’ mega-film was the undeniable culmination of science fiction ideas proceeding from decades earlier.

The Animatrix can undoubtedly be compared to preceding films such as Heavy Metal (1981) and the Japanese anthology Robot Carnival (1988). Its vision is sleeker, darker than Akira (1988) or Ghost in the Shell (1995), and the stylistic sweep covers everything from rotoscoped characters to outright CGI (the last, in the segment "Final Flight of the Osiris," is somewhat the film's only disappointment, as it looks dated, and suspiciously like the graphics from a contemporary video game).

The Animatrix flows by like the steady consciousness stream we inveigle to classify, impose our personal narratives upon—our own daydream of our humdrum existence; i.e. every inch of the mental Matrix we all unknowingly occupy as dreamers during our long, interminable, living sleep. It gives us a glimpse of what Rod Serling called "The land of shadow and substance." In the world of 2025, we find ourselves unerringly and inexorably moving, via our coming symbiosis with the Artificial Mind, away from substance. Will shadow, like the sky of Zero One, blot out our substance? Only G-d, whoever or whatever He is, could determine that. And He may well be living our dream, just as much as we live His.

The Animatrix

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