Animatrix Review

Overall Rating 7.5 out of 10 - Mixed from very good to downright bad experience.

I can still recommend watching.

This is a show of very uneven quality. At its best it is as good as Serial Experiments Lain and even better. At worst however, it is as bad as Technolize. It has 9 episodes that are only loosely connected together.

I will begin with good. Good is our occasional existentialist observation. Just like Serial Experiments Lain it deals with questions of how technology, computers and robots will shape our world. Episodes 2 and 4 are especially good, but others have a few good parts here and there. 

However, if SEL was more impartial in its narrative. It offered a bird eye view on the world and fate of Lain herself, without trying to say who is right or wrong. SEL depicted actions and events without any clear one director who controls everything. No matter how much Masami Eiri believed he can control it all, the show proved him wrong. In world of SEL multitude of unconnected actors who act independently of each other and often in the name of conflicting objectives achieve patchwork world, the show so perfectly depicts. 

Animatrix however often shows overreaching power that rules this world and controls everything that happens there. Its Big Brother totalitarianism is suffocating at times. Unlike SEL that depicts unintentional consequences that computers and internet brought into the world, Animatrix depicts very intentional attempts to control and manipulate everything and everyone. Here many characters meet a truly sad end. The whole world is completely dystopian. Not everything of it was inherited from Matrix itself.

Now to the bad. Authors have rather bad taste in women, people, aesthetics and variety of other things. Often as bad as Technolize. Most anime crews did work out perfectly just what kind of women men want to see on screen. This one clearly ignores it.

Just as in Technolize authors seem enjoy trolling viewer and offer something unpleasant to see. That is partly subjective, but an issue, nonetheless. They seem to enjoy drawing ugly things and situations. It's not that art of poor quality, quality is rather decent here, especially for 2005. It's the artistic direction. For example, DearS, Hand Maid May and Kill Me Baby suffer from the opposite problem: what they want to depict is good, but their ability to do so is poor.

Anyhow I do get what they want to show their literary fiction cryptic language, but most of the time I do not like their message. I wonder if the same crew is also behind Technolize, Sidonia and Ergo Proxy?

Nonetheless I will recommend this one. It's both short and diverse enough to serve as taster show of sorts. At times its as insightful as Ikuhara works even if it's as much of a mixed experience as Mawaru Penguindrum.