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).

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.

I'm not a rabid fan of The Matrix (too many logistical flaws), though I have seen the two live action movies and plan on seeing the third (though I have to wonder why it is that so many movies lately are transition movies--Star Wars Episode 2, Matrix 2, X-2, etc).

My main reason for purchasing the Animatrix was that I am an animation lover, and not just of Disney or anime. I love Looney tunes, peanuts, Max Fleisher, Watership Down, Ralph Bakshi, Fantastic Planet, Wallace and Gromitt, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Simpsons, etc. You get the picture. Of these nine stories, I can only say I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Not only is it beautifully animated, it has an imagination that rivals Miyazaki's. "Beyond" adds to the matrix mythology the essential element that it has been missing from the beginning: humanity in concrete terms. Unlike most of the rest, including the live action movies, it doesn't *talk* about what it's like to be human, because the characters are too busy being humans. It isn't about the mumbo jumbo of freeing one's mind to escape this seeming prison; instead, it shows someone, raised to believe the prison is not a prison, and she reacts realistically to it. Unlike the movies, it creates the sense that the people aren't automatons and are worth saving. (Not to take it too seriously, but just think of how many people they waste in all those shooting sprees--what, are they not worthy? Just because they don't buy into Morpheus' truth? Shouldn't they, ethically, knowing how these people will react to them, try to avoid conflicts with the caged humans, or at least attempt to use less-than lethal force? After all, is someone still a hero if they have to become the villain to save the world?).

The only real problem with Beyond is that it depicts animals as being as real as the humans (they're not, remember the deja-vu scene). But then, with the ending of Matrix Reloaded, perhaps there will be answers to this in Matrix Revolutions.

9/10. Seriously. You should see this even if you hate the matrix.

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.