YMMV / The Animatrix

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Judging for how cartoonishly biased against mankind the entire chronicle is, many interpret the Instructor from the Second Renaissance segments as an Unreliable Narrator who built the whole thing as pro-machine propaganda. Then again, she at least has the common sense to recognise what the machines have done.
  "May Man and Machine be forgiven for their sins. Bless all forms of intelligence."
  • It's equally possible to interpret the Instructor's bias as an understatement, considering the fact that 1. many of the scenes pictured in the short are recreations of historical incidents, indicating that 2. people are capable of the same level of barbarism towards each other that they subjected to the machines. For anyone who is more familiar with how utterly cruel human beings can be over the pettiest of differences, nothing about the premise of this short can be far-fetched. Making this Truth in Television.
  • Another point in doubt of the notion that the Instructor is peddling pro-machine propaganda is the amount of sympathy she displays for humanity's fate — but even more pertinently, she is introduced as a digital avatar for the Zion Archives — meaning that she represents the collation of humanity's knowledge of what preceded the eventual founding of Zion, as (presumably) determined by the academic bodies of Earth's last human settlement.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: While the idea of Tibetan monks supporting war against the machines seems absolutely absurd at first blush, Tibetan Buddhists have, in fact, been involved in a number of controversial and violent actions that would indicate that this is, in fact, plausible.
• Anvilicious:
  • The first part "The Second Renaissance" beats the Humans Are Bastards message into the audience's brains so much (humans murder robots in several direct parallels of real-life acts of genocide, humans engage in moments of Stupid Evil like permanently blotting out the sun, all the major world religions sanction war against the machines, including Tibetan monks^note Beats neo-nazism, at least) that it comes off as unbelievable hyperbole, hence the idea that the narrator is an Unreliable Narrator. It may also come across as a form of Reality Is Unrealistic — militant Buddhists DO exist — and in the animated sequence the monks in question are not presented as active participants to the war (in fact, there's no evidence given that they even condone what's happening); they're simply shown praying for the wellbeing of the soldiers. By extension, no religious representative of any denomination shown in the film is shown to support the motion to fight the machines, but they are shown offering spiritual advice and moral support to the fighters who stake their faith in them — something which religious services would provide in almost any circumstance.
  • "The Second Renaissance" also pre-emptively drops quite a few anvils in favor of granting sentient machines civil rights. Comparisons are made to other civil rights struggles, like the Amistad, Those Wacky Nazis, the Chinese democracy movement, and Exodus. And as a counterpoint to the overwhelming amount of smack humanity's image receives for its actions in the short, it IS emphatically stressed that there were plenty of humans who were highly sympathetic to the idea of AI sentience, quoted almost verbatim as dissenting voices that questioned: "who was to say [the] machine, *endowed with the spirit of man,* was not as deserving of a fair hearing?" This could potentially explain how the machines were eventually allowed territory to found their own settlement without any dispute.
  • Another anvil dropped at the expense of humanity's actions is the folly of greed and pride. The final act of the first part has the machine Ambassadors' plea to join the UN and foster a stable global economic system that benefits man and machine alike be soundly and violently rejected, because human leaders couldn't fathom co-operating with what they still regarded as their creations, plus they resented that so much leverage over humanity's livelihood was already under machine control. This is what finally motivates human nations to make an attempt at eradicating the machines, and it doesn't take a massive stretch to make a parallel with the 20th century arms race as a very convenient example of what unchecked competitiveness and paranoia can do to the human collective.
• Awesome Music: "Supermoves remix" during the Robot War of "The Second Renaissance" segment. "Virus" from the World Record segment.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Matriculated focuses on a group of humans trying to convince a machine to swap sides and fight for the rebels. While their attempts ultimately fail, The Matrix Resurrections shows that some machines did legitimately end up swapping over to the side of the humans following the events of Revolutions, meaning that their efforts weren't for naught.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Wachowskis being trans women is made slightly funny with the presence of an Action Girl named "Cis".
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • "Program": Kaiser is a human rebel who puts his recruits through grueling simulations to test their mettle. After Cis chooses the red pill, Kaiser has a simulated Love Interest try to sway her into betraying the team, congratulating her on passing when she "kills" the man, even laughing off her punching him in the face in a rage.
  • "A Detective Story": While evading the machines, Trinity scouts for humans with the willpower to learn the truth of the simulation. After one is driven to insanity, Trinity draws in protagonist Ash and debugs him but has to fatally wound him when he's taken by an Agent, complimenting his strength before escaping her pursuers.
• More Popular Spin Off: This anthology of animated shorts enjoyed a much better critical reception compared to the rest of the Blitz of The Matrix entries released in 2003 (The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions and Enter the Matrix).
• Rooting for the Empire: The Second Renaissance can easily make the machines look like the good guys of the series. To wit, they are created as a slave race (and are severely punished for disobeying their "masters"), they make a number of attempts at peaceful coexistence, all of which are mucked up by a violent and uncaring humanity, and they more or less are forced into warfare and subjugating the human race after the human military cuts off their main power supply. Based on this short, and the fact that — when you think about it — the machines more or less created the Matrix as a mercy to their former masters (they could just have easily left them chained to their power-pods, considering that the original idea of having the Matrix powered by human neural activity got axed by Executive Meddling), the viewer could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that they've spent the series rooting for the wrong side.
• Signature Scene: For entire anthology, it's the dojo scene from Final Flight of the Osiris.
  • The Second Renaissance has a robotic version of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which marks a change from somewhat realistic tone to absolutely surreal experience of incoming scenes.
  • In case of Program, Cis cutting through Duo's mask and landing on his own spear.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The Second Renaissance. Given how many times it's mentioned on this very page, the section it has in the Nightmare Fuel page, and how grotesque and cartoonishly disturbing the grim imagery and violence is, you'll understand if more than a few viewers are turned off or disturbed by it. Part of the problem is that it's very unclear who we're supposed to be rooting for as the Humans Are Bastards trope is being taken to extremes, so it's impossible to sympathize with the humans, and the Machines become literal monsters by the end and ultimately enslave mankind.
• Woolseyism: The Spanish dub was made over a very shoddy translation, which alters many lines and makes them sound awkward most of the time. However, it also changes the line said by the soldier who is wrenched out of his Mini-Mecha in "The Second Renaissance" to a considerably better effect: in the original it is just a generic exclamation of fear, while the dub renders it as the same line said by the robot murdered by the human mob ("I don't want to die!"), making it a brilliant Ironic Echo.
• Woobie Species:
  • In part one of The Second Renaissance segment, the machines are a sapient species created to be mankind's slaves, and received progressively worse retaliations by mankind when they try to fight for their own rights. What drives this particularly home is how they attempt multiple peaceful solutions, each shot down by the increasing paranoid humanity. Of course, all goes down the drain in part 2, when the war ends and they start on things like human experimentation and enslavement, but still...
  • The battle between the humans and the machines shows the earlier models of machine faring poorly and being destroyed wholesale, with later, deadlier models ending the war in a brutally sadistic fashion. The progression seems to imply a change among the machines themselves, who under pressure evolve from trying to peacefully coexist with humans to the more familiar version that is far more deadly, fearsome, and cruel.

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