The Animatrix: Beyond

Most everyone I've talked to feels this was by far the most moving of the Animatrix shorts. I wholeheartedly agree, but I wasn't sure why at first. I think I've figured it out.

We all have those beautiful moments in life that surprise us, overwhelm us, and then just disappear. The problem is that we as humans can't really communicate experiences with each other. The best we can usually do is vaguely explain the circumstances of an experience and hope to trigger memories of that experience in someone else. It still only works if the person has already had the experience. If someone tells me about their first love, I can only understand it by remembering how I felt during mine. If someone explains what it's like to be abused as a child, I really can't relate no matter how well it's described.

There is, however, a good trick that can be used to convey feelings. Use a fictional but literal description that should provoke the same feeling. For example, to describe heartbreak, I may say it felt like someone ripped my heart out and kicked it into a trash can. Hopefully, you can imagine this literally happening to you and end up with the same feeling as I have.

This is what "Beyond" does. It describes what it feels like to experience beautiful human moments without requiring very specific empathy. Sometimes, with the way they make us feel, the moments we experience might as well be glitches in a perfectly running computer program that we bumble into and are deleted from under us just as quickly. Even an alien who only vaguely feels awe and wonder at the possibility of physics breaking down elegantly for a short time could understand the excitement, awe, and sadness that a human feels every few years, if one is so lucky.

Beyond is, hands down, the best of the Animatrix shorts, a simple story about a woman who explores a "haunted" house in search of her missing cat. It's a bit difficult to understand if you haven't seen The Matrix Reloaded, but it does address one point that was made in that movie that I had hoped they would go into in more detail, namely ghosts, vampires, werewolves and other paranormal phenomena being entirely the result of a glitch in the Matrix. Beyond is a haunting piece reminiscent of the "Labyrinth" segment of Neo-Tokyo, an obscure anthology of anime shorts by Rin Taro (Metropolis), Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll) and Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira).

Coming in at about 13 minutes, this, the seventh of the Animatrix short is the longest of them all. The pacing is mostly good, and in spite of sometimes being laid-back, it's never boring. The animation is great, a nice mix of 2D Animé style and gorgeous 3D CGI elements. The many surreal visuals are beautifully realized. The writer and director behind this has a vivid imagination, however, this is not for everyone. It deals with the idea of glitches in the programming, and how they are perceived or treated by those who discover them. The themes explored aren't bad. The concept doesn't go as far as it arguably could, but I understand that the Wachowski's requested that it go no further than it does. The sounds and music are well-done. Voice acting has fine performances. The characters are credibly written and portrayed. This doesn't directly relate to the films, other than taking place in the same world as they do. It has a making of, on the DVD, which runs at about nine minutes, and is interesting and worth watching. I recommend this to fans of the Matrix universe and/or science fiction. 7/10

Unlike the other Matrix films and short films which seemed dismal and nihilistic, this short film has a very bright and lively feel to it. The characters are very human and expressive rather than stiff and wordy like they can be in the other films. The story is told through emotion and wonder, and it works.

Beyond will probably score high in almost everybody's list of the Animatrix shorts, and I am one of them. It tells the story of a haunted house (a glitch in the matrix), in which a group of kids play with gravity and such.

A good story well told and well animated, it is one of the highlights of the Animatrix. It's actually an addition to the movies, which should have been the case for all of them. Instead, we got silly shorts like Matriculated and Program. So, if you only have time for a couple of the nine, check out this one as well as the first 'Last flight of the Osiris', and leave the rest of them.

7/10.