DVD Watch

The Animatrix

Warner Home Video, $24.98 The Matrix Reloaded may not have been slighted for "a series of dull and often incomprehensible scenes of exposition and yakky gabfests" (according to Chron critic Marc Savlov) had we all seen these superb animated short films sometime before the release of the trilogy's overhyped second installment. With The Animatrix, the Wachowski Brothers decided to mine their man-dominated machine world for an endless array of storytelling possibilities, enlisting seven renowned (at least in Japan) anime directors to create a nine-part series that is just as sexy, gritty, beautiful, and philosophical as the original Matrix. A few shorts were released for free via the Internet, like "The Second Renaissance" -- a two-part vignette detailing the destruction of the world -- while others, like CGI masterpiece "Final Flight of the Osiris," were included as theatrical opening acts for studio disasters like Dreamcatcher. Yet, in true Wachowski Brothers fashion, they saved the best films' debut for the DVD release. "Kid's Story" flows like a dream in brush strokes and explains one of the incomprehensible subplots in Reloaded (whether that subplot is even necessary is still up for debate). In "World Record," the whole concept of a runner's high is taken to a twisted new level. Aeon Flux-creator Peter Chung directs "Matriculated," which, much like his MTV show, is visually breathtaking and kind of makes sense. But my favorite is "Beyond," stylized in that classic, bubbly Japanimation form, about a girl who goes looking for her runaway cat and ends up in an abandoned house where the rules of the Matrix cease to apply. At the very least, each episode of The Animatrix is intriguing, managing to restimulate those flurries of thought that stormed down after the original.