The Animatrix - Detective’s Story
Yet another style: a film noir. Like any proper film noir, everything’s in black and white. The art style is the most realistic one yet. It isn’t as overly pointy as in Matriculated, or as overexaggerated as in World Record. And certainly not as messy as in Kid’s Story. Everything also seems to have gotten a noise filter.
The story is about a detective who accepts a case to look for Trinity. He gathers a bit of information, and then realizes that there’ve been more detectives on the same case. One killed himself, one went missing and one went crazy. The latter keeps claiming that Trinity isn’t real. The detective then continues to search through chatrooms and cafes, frequented by hackers. At one point, he finds a certain Red Queen, who happens to be Trinity.
Trinity sends the message to him that in order to meet her, he’ll have to jump the first of six brooks. This appears to be a train. Inside the train, he sees Trinity. She reckons that he might be able to make it. The entire assignment seems to have been a test for him, to see whether he would make it. She then puts some kind of machine on him, and extracts something out of his eye. It’s the same thing they tried to poison Neo with in the movie, I think.
Then a couple of men in suits appear, and chase after them. However, the detective himself begins to change into one of these men. Trinity then shoots him. Then the two of them talk a bit, and Trinity escapes.
To be honest, I didn’t really like this one. It felt like a bit too fast, and the references were all lost on me. First of six brooks? He talks about a certain Alice who jumps the second brook to get her into the woods. Alice jumps the first brook and then she boards a train. Who the heck is this Alice, why does she jump brooks, why are a number of streets highlighted on the map? How does he know which train to catch? In fact… what is a brook anyway?
I think that this film was a bit too short for its own good. I think it would be better if it borrowed some time from Matriculated. In the end, the case is interesting, though the other three films were thought-provoking. This one, however, wasn’t. I don’t seem to have any inspiration because of it.