Awesome / The Animatrix

• Beyond is one of the most stunning animated shorts of all time. The soundtrack alone is incredible in its own right. Don't forget the gorgeous animation, which is both extremely unusual and very natural feeling when the characters are in motion.
• A Detective Story should go here for combining two radically different genres, Film Noir and Cyberpunk, smoothly and beautifully. The ending with the shootout and the detective pointing his gun at the Agents in pure defiance of their mind control/body hopping abilities (and lighting himself a cigarette at that) counts too.
  • Film Noir and Cyberpunk actually have a lot of shared history, with many early or proto-Cyberpunk stories famously being Hardboiled Detective stories, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into Blade Runner. This segment is a great callback to the genre's roots.
• Although horrifying BY DESIGN, both parts of The Second Renaissance are filled with this, but most noteworthy is the Epic Battle sequence. Rare to see that in animation nowadays.
• Kid's Story for one reason. Kid manages to wake himself up from the Matrix, something nobody, not even Neo, thought was possible.
• World Record
  • It begins with a narration that basically says that some people find out about the Matrix without any help due to having key senses of intuition, sensitivity, and a questioning nature, and a rare few find out through "wholly different means." The story is about a runner who breaks the titular record for the 100 meter dash, only for his medal to be revoked due to testing positive for drugs. Undeterred, he runs another race, and, despite being chased by Agents and having all his leg muscles blow out from overexertion, manages to break even his previous record, and in fact manages to break out of the Matrix for a few seconds because it couldn't handle how fast he was going.
  • The ending. The runner has been reduced to being pushed around in a wheelchair by a chatty nurse, paraplegic but nearly comatose, and is being monitored by one of the Agents that had been watching and chasing him earlier. The Agent comments that "he will never run again. He will never even walk again for that matter." At that moment, the runner mutters the word "free" and stands up, shattering the braces bolting his legs to his wheelchair in the process. As the Agent has a mild freakout and the nurse chases after him, the runner steps forward, hands outstretched towards the light- and for one brief moment before his injuries kick back in, his feet leave the ground.
• Program has Cis pulling a Bare-Handed Blade Block, breaking the katana, then ramming it into her foe's throat.
• Final Flight of The Osiris, beyond being a CMOA in its own right just for the quality of the CG animation for the time, has the crew of the Osiris delaying the Sentinels long enough for Jue to deliver a message that will kick off the entire plot of the two Matrix sequels. We see several of the gunners continue firing at the oncoming swarm even as the Sentinels force their way into the ship behind them, and Thaddeus is last shown standing over Jue fighting off Sentinels with a BFG.

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