The Animatrix: Beyond

A young girl, Yoko, sets out food for her cat but gets worried when the pet doesn't show up at the usual time. Asking around the neighbourhood, she finds a group of kids who say they saw the cat over by a building they know as `the haunted house'. She goes over to see if she can find her cat but finds much stranger things than she expected.

Part of the series of animations making up the Matrix companion piece `The Animatrix', I saw this as a stand alone piece recently at a festival of shorts and animations and was drawn in by where it was going even if it was a bit strange and seemed unlikely in what I knew of the matrix universe. As the house gave up it's secrets, the short seemed more and more unlikely and it lost me a little bit.

The animation is pretty good but lacks the heavily stylised feel that some of the others of the series have. That is not necessarily a bad thing but it needed more in the way of substance to make it work. The feel at the start is good as it uses music and an observational atmosphere to good effect but I never bought into the plot and it didn't really go anywhere of interest that added to the universe of the matrix.

Overall this starts well but goes nowhere. Those who love the first film of the trilogy may also find the central premise rather hard to accept.

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).

This short is in many ways the opposite of "World Record". Where that film is based on an clever concept and idea, and totally wasted its potential, "Beyond" is based on a simple concept, and takes it, well, beyond what I expected (pardon the pun). World Record uses cold and surreal animation to tell a fairly real story. Beyond uses warm and traditional animation to tell a somewhat surreal and bizarre story.

In short, it is a work of contradictions. The story - and there isn't all that much of it, to be honest - is about a group of kids who find a haunted house (a glitch in the matrix) and accept it as perfectly natural part of their world, they enjoy the enchanted surroundings with the childhood innocence that they still possess.

I can only recommend this short movie - after "Kid's Story" it is perhaps the best of the Animatrix quickies. Fun, and enchanting.

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

This is the sixth part of 'The Animatrix', a collection of animated short movies that tell us a little more about the world of 'The Matrix'. In this short we see some kind of flaw in the matrix. There is a house where things can not break and it seems that there is no gravity there. There is not much action and may be that is why I didn't like it as much as the other shorts. It was still a nice fantasy story so I was still entertained.