1st Episode Of Animatrix Released

Devistater writes "The official Matrix page has word of the first officially released widescreen Anime episode of the Animatrix for download (in quicktime format). This is the first of 4 free episodes that will be released on the web. A total of 9 episodes will be availible for purchase on DVD within the next few months. The feature-quality anime shorts range in length from 6 minutes to 16 minutes. There's a trailer availible if you want to get a taste for what they will be like."

If you just want to download it...

[juancn]

...and avoid QuickTime(TM) player, you can try:

wget "http://progressive.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/animatrixlgfinal_dl.m ov"

Have Fun!

Damn

[dnaumov]

Heh, the first QuickTime movie that MPlayer fails on me with :(

Starting playback...
mjpeg: JFIF header found (version: 1.1)
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2)
VDec: Codec did not set sh->disp_w and sh->disp_h, trying workaround.
Error while decoding frame!04 ct: -0.000 3/ 3 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)0.000 5/ 5 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)

etc...

Interesting but...

[tjensor]

... In the first film it they intimated that they didnt really know much history - they didnt even know the date. This seems to show quite a detailed history of what happened.

Its also quite sympathetic to the machines. If you are one of the last of a group which has almost been wiped out, you are unlikely to see your history from the point of view of those who did the wiping.

Matrix: another film by Hollywood Luddites Assoc.

[magarity]

The problem with The Matrix was its message: technology is inherently bad. The dialog places the blame of the whole Matrix world being due to "scientists messing with things they shouldn't" (paraphrased). Other movies, like the Terminator series, are just as bad. I don't get why such a blatantly anti-technology movie is so popular with the technology crowd, other than appreciation for the work that went into the special effects.

Re:Interesting but...

[jgerman]

Just because "they" as in the characters in the first movie didn't know much of the history doesn't mean that there can't be other stories which do illuminate the history in the setting. Also the humans you meet in the Matrix are initially from humans that had been grown/put to sleep. The seeting of the movie is after the machines enslaved mankind.

Re:Adapting anime for a new feminist millennium

[dalassa]

*Yawn* Of course anime is sexist and full of cheesecake, just as much as American shows do. the main difference is that the anime is far more likely to have sexually appealing underage girls.

As to anime as porn, replace every instance of anime in your previous statement with "movie." We have live action porn movies in this country, it uses a medium that is also used to convey works of art and random schlock. Just like anime. As a feminist should I avoid everything that might be tainted with non feminist ideals or should I just keep that in mind while I watch a damn goos show?.

If you want disturbing elements though, try reading up on the casual libking of sex and violence in Japanese culture. It gets very disturbing when you delve into it.

Re:Matrix: another film by Hollywood Luddites Asso

[Anonymous Coward]

>The problem with The Matrix was its message: >technology is inherently bad.

Still another problem with the Matrix series: they suggest several times that authority figures are inherently evil. I'd disagree with that. The machines in the Matrix aren't merely energy thieves; their software-driven world is a paradise for those who dwell within it.

You of course "pay" to be immersed in paradise. That sounds like living in most nations of the world. In real life, no matter what country you're in, you pay tax in some form in order for the government to protect and care for you. This framework is called the social contract.

Why I find the Matrix so disturbing is that it suggests that we can and should do away with this social contract without establishing a replacement for it. It blithely suggests that anarchy is a viable alternative to this. They seem to have forgotten that without the machines the entire software world will probably fail. What's more, the main heroes never attempted to create their own society through anything other than violence.

I think we often refer to that sort of behavior as ... Terrorism.

Re:Adapting anime for a new feminist millennium

[sam_handelman]

There is a certain substantive portion of the anime produced for which the above is entirely true. It certainly is not a troll. To the extent that japanese women view japanese pornography - which is vile stuff, substantially - this is spot on, and a great deal of anime is merely sexist. American women view slasher movies which might follow in a similar psychological vein; I'm not sure that "internalising oppression" is really what is happening - people have a certain fascination with the horiffic which I think draws women to watch horror movies, and may draw japanese women to watch japanese pornography, such of it as includes a great deal of rape or S&M or what have you. To say that women who view softcore pornography are necesarilly self-loathing is excessively prudish. More apologetics below.

However, and this has been true for a long time, it is not a recent devlopment, a great deal of anime is not sexist.

In a lot of anime the female characters are stylised representations with exagerated secondary sexual characteristics - this is often true in material which objectifies women in a sexist fashion, but sylised (cartoony) representations of people do NOT necesarilly objectify them. Any particular work must be viewed as a whole. Having been a teenage boy, I can say that my perception of women at that time was hyper-sexualised; this is pretty much universal among straight teenage boys.

Is adolescent male sexuality inherently sexist? I think that it is not.

Is it sexist for artists who were teenage boys to represent female characters in this way, particularly if the protagonist is an adolescent male, as is often the case? It is not. It's an accurate representation of an internal environment, which is what a cartoon is intended to do.

To the extent that this stylistic element is repeated in works by women, which are about 50% of what is produced - I will not speculate on the internal environment of adolescent girls, but I don't think this arises from self-loathing, I think that would be reflected in the female characters behavior rather than in how they are drawn.

Finally, in a sexist society (Japan) is it sexist to represent sexist interpersonal relationships in a work of fiction? I agree that it is good and laudible for a work of fiction to attempt to break down popular preconceptions and prejudices, but it is always okay for a work of fiction to reflect one's actual experiences.

Re:What exactly is going on?

[truenoir]

As already mentioned, the Matrix was *definitely* influenced by anime (and martial arts movies). Story has many similarities to Lain (as mentioned) and also Ghost in the Shell. In fact, there's a website pointing out the similar scenes http://www.geocities.com/tacobelll/matrixgits/ Even the green text stuff was in the opening credits for the GiTS movie. Of course, that's not to say that the animes didn't get influenced by earlier sci-fi works and such, however, the Matrix bears a lot of sylistic similarity to anime, particularly GiTS and Lain (when she starts getting into the Wired, got wires clipped to herself as the interface...).

Re:01?

[Phattypants]

Good point, but the machines probably consider their inception, as in their creation, inclusion in human society, and nigh destruction to be index "00" and seeing the failure of that existence, incremented to version "01" to signify a new begining. Eh?

Do you people realize what this is?

[vidnet]

They've listened to your "If I could try it for free [from a fast server/in good quality/in a non-drm format], I'd be more likely to buy it" comments!

I've always thought people said that to justify their copyright violations.. well, now's your chance to prove me, and more importantly WB, wrong.

Re:To play quicktime

[Robotech_Master]

Okay, I recompiled mplayer with the use-qtx-codecs enabled, and subsequently downloaded ffmpeg and compiled it again, and this time it'll play the first frame of the Matrix movie, and the audio, but not the video.

Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)

A bit later, we get...

Checking audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit...
AF_pre: af format: 2 bps, 2 ch, 44100 hz, little endian signed int
AF_pre: 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian)
AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps)
Building audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit...
Starting playback...
mjpeg: JFIF header found (version: 1.1)
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2)
VDec: Codec did not set sh->disp_w and sh->disp_h, trying workaround.
Error while decoding frame!37 ct: -0.009 3/ 3 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)0.015 5/ 5 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)

After a few screens of this, I get:

MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: decode_audio
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. For details, see DOCS/bugreports.html#crash.b.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your gcc
version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read DOCS/bugreports.html
and follow the instructions there. We can't and won't help unless you provide
this information when reporting a possible bug.
SoundConverterEndConversion:0
SoundConverte rClose:0

If anyone can help out with this, I'd appreciate it. I don't have any trouble watching other quicktimes with this...

Re:Ugh...

[dr00g911]

Found a solution.

Apparently Quicktime Player itself will piece the thing together, even if the server drops the connection repeatedly.

From within Quicktime Player, go to File --> Open URL in New Player

They cut and paste:

http://progressive.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline /p rogressive/thematrix/us/med/animatrixlgfinal_dl.mo v

Worked like a charm. Full speed ahead.

Nicer format

[HoppQ]

I did that (convert it to nicer format that is). Ogg media stream container, mpeg4 video using mencoder+libavcodec (2pass, high quality, 4 motion vectors per macroblock, bitrate 800 kbit), Ogg Vorbis audio (quality 1). Result is a 58MB big file. Obviously there is quality loss (the original was 141MB), and mencoder seems not to encode all frames, making it a bit skippy at times (this also probably explains the small size).

It is good quality IMHO (good enough for me to dump the original), and the audio is in sync (the original file has two audio streams, but mplayer ignores the shorter one, for this encoding I decoded both streams to raw pcm, concatenated the streams and encoded the one stream). If you don't like it, don't use it.

Oh, and I had to split it in two since I don't have enough webspace in one spot for 58 megs. Either play them consecutively or join them with ogmcat(1) found in the ogmtools [bunkus.org] .

File 1, 39MB [mbnet.fi]
File 2, 19MB [personal.inet.fi]