Here's what to watch after TheMatrixResurrections
From left: Ghost in the Shell, The Animatrix, Dark City. Photo: Lionsgate; Warner Bros. When it first debuted in 1999, The Matrix pulled a neat trick: It looked like nothing else anyone had ever seen before despite sampling and remixing a raft of pop-cultural source material.
The Animatrix If you liked The Matrix and want to dip your toes into action anime, there’s no better crash course than The Animatrix — an anthology of short films made by respected anime directors. The results are a visual bounty, a format that was mimicked earlier this year to almost equal effect in the Star Wars: Visions anthology.
Available to stream for free YouTube Ninja Scroll Alongside Akira and Ghost in the Shell, director Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s film Ninja Scroll wove its way into the ’90s anime cult fandom in the United States, so much so that not only were the Wachowskis influenced by it — they invited him to direct sequences of The Animatrix. “The way they edited their scenes was very similar to the way I edit my scenes, but when you do it in live action it has a totally different feel,” Kawajiri once pointed out.
Blade Runner The granddaddy of dystopian cyberpunk cinema, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner introduced a ton of visual iconography and existentialist ideology that would reappear in The Matrix films. As a film re-cut and re-released in several forms over the years, you could also draw a comparison to how its mystique also mirrored the Matrix saga’s “viral” approach to marketing — a long strategy of leaking plot points and character details through websites, games, and hidden DVD extras.