Very interesting, a documentary. It’s the first time the art style isn’t easy to define. It’s a mix of CGI frames with rather common character designs. Most of the time we see robots doing their thing, and we don’t really see that many humans.

In any case, this documentary explains how The Matrix originated, why the robots took over control and more background information behind The Matrix. It’s a rather gruesome tale, which makes clear that humanity indeed got what it deserved. This film has been split in two, so the last remaining one will end this story.

In the beginning, humans constructed robots, and the robots fully obeyed the humans. The robot design was rather unrealistic, but it does bring over the point. The robots possessed AI, and they were treated rather badly. Still, entire armies of robots kept working for the humans, doing all of the hard, harsh and dirty jobs.

Then, one robot stood up against its master, and killed him and his entire family. Because of this, humans got scared, and tried to dispose of the robots. What followed was a huge war in which the robots were shamelessly killed off in huge masses. People became to hate the machines. With passion. What follows is a couple of scenes showing the graveyards for these robots. It’s not funny when you realize how many of these were dumped. Entire ocean floors were filled with their corpses.

The surviving machines fled, in order to start a nation of their own, somewhere in Arabia. They called their nation “Zero-One”, or 01. They began to live a life of their own, improving their own AI and equipment. They then attempted to coexist with humans, and participate in the world economy. However.

The leaders of the humans, with their power degrading, didn’t feel anything for cooperation with the robots, who still had good intentions at that time. The robots, attempting to be recognized were killed off. What happens afterwards, we learn in the second part of The Second Renaissance.

Yet again, we’ve got lots of symbolism in this movie. The robots have been given a uniform and human-like design, like in most ancient robot movies. It’s not really realistic when you look at today’s huge diversity of machines. But by giving these robots human characteristics, this film does manage to give them a uniformity. Because of this, things don’t get unnecessarily complicated. And it also provokes some sympathy for these robots, like Matriculated tried to do. I’d say that The Second Renaissance managed to do this better than Matriculated.

Huge exterminations, like shown here, have occurred more often in the history of humanity, at times, even more extreme than this one. Most mass murderers never really got their equal payback (Incans vs. Spain, anyone?). This time, however, payback in the most extreme form arrives. Still, the fact does remain that people uninvolved got their payback as well. I guess that’s inevitable.

The question remains whether what the robots did was the right thing. After all, they were heavily abused, and revenge is sweet. Apparently, even for robots. Still, both the humans and the robots were wrong in this case. The humans for abusing the robots, and the robots for going through the extreme measures of locking the humans up. What happened to love and peace, everyone?

The Place Promised in our Early Days is a 90-minute long drama/romance. It features three middle-school kids (two boys and a girl). The boys are building their own airplane, in order to fly to a huge tower. This tower raises from the earth, into the sky with no apparent end. They’re planning to take the girl, who they just met and got interested, along with them. One day, she disappears. The two boys then quit building the plane, go to different high schools and split apart. Three years later, the story continues.

The story has been well written. The key parts always return, keeping this anime on track. It could basically have been done in 30 minutes as well, though this anime chooses for a slow pacing, giving enough space to show characters interacting, and doing the things they usually do. Because the show takes its time, no really rushed scenes appear, and strangely enough, no scenes really drag on, as plenty enough happens on the screen.

The characters also are likable. They receive a healthy dose of character development during the progress of the movie, and the 3-year time-leap shows quite some changes in both of the boys. The approach of and climax itself felt very sincere, ending in a rather predictable, yet somewhat touching ending.

Still, there are a couple of things wrong with this movie. In the end, this movie remains a damsel-in-distress, who has to be saved by the knight. While it has thrown in some creative events which give this concept a couple of twists, I couldn’t help but get annoyed at this fact. At some scenes, it features some annoying technobabble. We see a couple of screens and graphs, which don’t mean anything at all. Some events in the movie also don’t make any sense (why didn’t the tower explode when the girl was still awake?) and the movie leaves an awful lot of things behind unexplained.

The graphics are interesting. Despite being produced in 2005, the creators decided to keep the character art simple. If you combine this with fluid and natural animation, creative and stunning backgrounds and details, the result becomes quite interesting to watch. Overall, the graphics for this movie were very enjoyable to see. Except for one little detail. The creators liked to heavily abuse the lens flares. Every time when the sun goes down, one appears, asking way too much attention by being overly bright, big and centred. The musical score stays original, though consistent through the entire movie. You never really know it’s there, but it does give this movie something extra. When the music stops, it contributes surprisingly well to the scenes.

Overall, this was a good movie, with some flaws. Still, while it was a good watch, it’s nothing really special. Nothing really is outstanding in this movie. In the end, this movie kept me from getting bored, but it also kept me from getting excited.

Even though setting up a post like this one takes a while, I love making these kinds of statistics. ^^;
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