Film

The Animatrix

Name: The Animatrix
Genre: Animation, Science Fiction
Released: 2003
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Clayton Watson, Pamela Adlon, Melinda Clarke

Science fiction

Nine animated shorts, each handed to a different anime studio or director, filling in the corners of the Matrix trilogy — a doomed love story, a coded rebellion, the war that built the machines. Styles swing from noirish hand-drawn melancholy to slick CGI spectacle. It's a mixtape, not a movie: best watched by people who already love the world and want more texture, not newcomers looking for plot.

TMDb rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you are curious about the world behind the Matrix and enjoy seeing one myth stretched across several animators' very different styles, from sleek anime action to quieter, stranger detours.

Skip it if you want one continuous story, since these are separate shorts with uneven tones and a few of them are more talky than thrilling.

What it asks of you: Roughly an hour and three-quarters of attention, shifting styles and worlds with every short, so you'll keep resetting your eyes and expectations again and again.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Ghost in the Shell1995

This is the film the Wachowskis openly stole from — the cyberpunk philosophy, the visual grammar, even specific shots. Watching it after Animatrix feels like meeting the source of a river you've already swum in.

But Slow, meditative pacing with long philosophical pauses instead of action beats — this is not a shootout movie.

Akira1988

The anime that made the rest of the world take the medium seriously, and the template for the body-horror, city-at-night dread that runs through half of Animatrix's segments. Still looks astonishing.

But Dense mythology and breakneck plotting can be genuinely disorienting on a first watch, subtitles or no.

Batman: Gotham Knight2008

The direct structural sibling — six animated shorts, six different studios, one shared superhero mythology, made explicitly in Animatrix's image. If you liked the format here, this scratches the same itch.

But Some segments are genuinely striking, others feel like filler; quality swings hard between shorts.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Animatrix

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Robot Carnival1987

Animatrix's whole format — hand a shared universe to several auteurs and trust the pieces to cohere — is a direct descendant of this earlier, stranger Japanese anthology experiment.

The actual blueprint: eight different anime directors, one loose theme, no shared story — just a mechanical carnival rolling through disconnected worlds. This is what Animatrix was quietly imitating.

But Mostly wordless, slower and stranger than anything in Animatrix, and genuinely hard to find outside niche anime releases.

Love, Death & Robots2019

An anthology built on the same idea — wildly different animation styles and directors, no unifying story, just tone and imagination let loose. Sci-fi, horror, comedy, all crammed together.

But Inconsistent hit rate; several episodes are style with nothing underneath, and it knows it.

Cowboy Bebop1998

Gorgeous, genre-hopping anime with the same cool, melancholic underworld feel — bounty hunters drifting through a future that's stylish, lonely, and a little doomed. Endlessly rewatchable.

But Episodic, jazz-soaked mood over momentum; if you want plot to keep driving forward, it can feel loose.

Serial Experiments Lain1998

A genuinely unsettling anime about identity dissolving into networks and wires — the same reality-isn't-real dread as the Matrix universe, but colder, quieter, and stranger.

But Cryptic and slow by design; it demands patience and probably a rewatch to make sense of.

Blade Runner1982

The granddaddy of everything neon-soaked and morally uneasy about artificial minds. Live-action, but its DNA is all over the Matrix's rain-slicked cities and existential unease.

But Glacial pacing by modern standards — this is atmosphere and ideas well ahead of plot.

Neon Genesis Evangelion1995

Ambitious, gorgeous mecha anime that turns into a genuine existential crisis about identity, reality, and what it means to be human inside a machine.

But Notoriously bleak and its ending is famously divisive — go in knowing it won't wrap up neatly.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex2002

Takes the original film's ideas and stretches them into a procedural — hacking, terrorism, consciousness, episode after gorgeous episode. Great if you want more of that world at length.

But Two overlapping series with dense continuity can be a confusing place to jump in cold.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex poster

Fantasia1940

Six decades earlier, it made the same bet Animatrix makes — that handing a world to multiple artistic sensibilities produces something a single vision couldn't.

Disney's own anthology gamble: different animators, different pieces of music, no continuous plot, just trust that the fragments add up to something bigger. It's Animatrix's structural great-grandparent.

But No dialogue in most segments, deliberately slow, and a couple of sequences feel dated to modern eyes.

Waking Life2001

It strips away the guns, the machines, and the mythology to ask the exact question Animatrix's world is built on — how would you even know if this were real?

A rotoscoped fever dream drifting through conversations about whether waking life is itself a kind of dream — the Matrix's central question asked with nothing but voices and hand-traced animation.

But Plotless and talky, closer to a philosophy seminar than a story, and will bore anyone hoping for action.

People

Cast

Keanu ReevesNeo ("Kid's Story") (voice)
Carrie-Anne MossTrinity ("Kid's Story" and "A Detective Story") (voice)
Clayton WatsonThe Kid ("Kid's Story") (voice)
Pamela AdlonJue ("Final Flight of the Osiris") / Manabu ("Beyond") (voice)
Melinda ClarkeAlexa ("Matriculated") (voice)
John DiMaggioCrew Man ("Final Flight of the Osiris") / Kaiser ("Program") (voice)
Kevin Michael RichardsonThadeus ("Final Flight of Osiris") / Cop ("Kid's Story") / Agent #2 ("World Record")
Tom KennyOperator ("Final Flight of Osiris")
Rick GomezPilot ("Final Flight of Osiris")
Tara StrongCrew Woman ("Final Flight of Osiris") / Nurse ("World Record") / Misha ("Beyond")
Bette FordOld Woman ("Final Flight of Osiris")
Julia FletcherThe Instructor ("The Second Renaissance Part I & II") / Narrator ("World Record")