Second Episode of The Animatrix Released

murphyslawyer writes "The second episode of Animatrix is now available. Download it here"

The HQ variant for download.

[Anonymous Coward]

direct download [aol.com] (157MB)

mirror

[iosmart]

lol, i highly doubt the site will experience the slashdot effect...but here's a mirror of the windows medium quality (480x204) file for the heck of it. www.pchopper.com/mirror/matrix.zip [pchopper.com]

Re:So cool!

[Transient0]

for those not in the know:

What is the Animatrix? [ign.com]

Re:The HQ variant for download.

[sosedada]

you can save yourself a few MB if you click the "DOWNLOAD FILE" box. They have compressed versions available

Re:and...

[ZaMoose]

mplayer [mplayerhq.hu] is your friend.

Re:and...

[hazyshadeofwinter]

Oh, and you may need to patch MPlayer to play this, the patch is here. [mplayerhq.hu]

Unless the patch has made it into the current release/CVS.

Re:and...

[ZaMoose]

Not pushing another player at all. If you dl the Windows codecs available on the download page and set it up as a plugin (use this [sourceforge.net] to do so) and you're viewing QT files, no sweat.

Overview

[Kallahar]

For those unaware, the AniMatrix is a collection of Anime short stories about the world of the Matrix. The first one from this free series was an *excellent* protrayal of how the machines were created by man, became self aware, and then realized that the humans were exploiting them as slaves. The full DVD has many more short films about the Matrix universe.

Travis

How about a link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to oblige...

Zipped Quicktime, 640 resolution (largest), 149 MB. [aol.com]

END OF LINE.

Re:Download Format Question

[Sgs-Cruz]

Um, yes, because even if they can reduce this 150 MB file by, say, 8 megs, then if 100,000 people download it, that's 800 GB (using crappy hard-drive manufacturer base-10 definitions of GB because I'm too lazy right now to convert properly) of traffic they've just saved themselves. Impressive how it adds up when you're talking about popular downloads :)

Agreed.

[antdude]

The second episode wasn't exciting and cool to watch. I hope the remaining episodes are not like this one.

Re:What is it?

[Freezing Polaris]

Animatrix is a series of nine animated movies, from 7 well know anime directors, based on the world of Matrix. The Wachowsky brothers made some of the scripts, and the whole thing is to come to DVD later this year, with the first four movies made available to download, one episode per month. I can't tell for this one, but the first one was well done.

Re:What is it?

[Sancho]

It's an anime short based in the world of The Matrix. The first was posted about a month ago, along with a description. This is the second. There will be another one per month for awhile. And while it is Anime, it's (so far) been precursors to The Matrix, and very interesting in order to get a feel of how things got the way the are (in The Matrix).

XVid AVI conversion

[nstrom]

I'll download and convert this to XVID [xvid.org] AVI, easily playable on Windows with Media Player and Linux with MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu]. It should be done by tonight, and I'll post it to alt.binaries.multimedia.anime [binaries.m...edia.anime].

Re:What is it?

[sweetooth]

It's the second installment of the animated Matrix movies. Four of which are going to be released free on the Internet and then all nine episodes will be released on Junk 3rd on DVD. The first episode was released in February, the second today, the next in April and the final episode in May. The first and last episodes are Part 1 and Part 2 of the same story. They deal with various stories taking place in the Matrix, or in the case of the first episode before the matrix.

Check out all the info here [intothematrix.com].

From the site:

Springing forth from the world of THE MATRIX, THE ANIMATRIX DVD presents nine original short animated stories directed by preeminent anime directors.

The directors are: Andy Jones (Final Flight of The Osiris), Mahiro Maeda (The Second Renaissance: Parts 1 and 2), Shinichiro Watanabe (Kid's Story, Detective Story), Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Program), Takeshi Koike (World Record), Koji Morimoto (Beyond), Peter Chung (Matriculated).

Four of the nine episodes were written by Larry and Andy Wachowski, and all of the episodes are grounded in the world of the THE MATRIX.

DVD Special Features:

* "Scrolls to Screen: The History and Culture of Anime" documentary
* 7 featurettes with director profiles, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of each of the films
* 4 audio commentaries
* "Enter the Matrix" videogame trailer
* Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio
* Widescreen Format [16x9 2.35:1]
* Languages: English, Japanese
* Subtitles: English, French, Spanish

Bittorrent Link

[Robotech_Master]

FYI, Donkax.com [donkax.com] is offering a bittorrent download of the large version of the movie.

Bittorrent

[Openadvocate]

This is why stuff like BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org] (or [sourceforge.net]) would be very cool.

Large: edda4f49d5c0552fe6b72a7ee87b43ec

[Anonymous Coward]

Plays just fine. And why the "Off topic"? Not everyone has a broadband connection, it would be helpful to some people to know whether they downloaded it fine on their modem.

Re:I liked the first episode but .....

[rufo]

Just as a note, the writers of the first Animatrix episode were Andy and Larry Wachowski. This story has always been part of the Matrix universe - if you look around on the Matrix website you can find some online comics that tell the story of the one droid who was trying to defend himself, and they are also co-written by the Wachowskis. This is a pretty integral part of The Matrix's world, and I wouldn't be surprised if the second and third movies delved into this a bit more.

Square Animatrix Short With Dreamcatcher

[Robotech_Master]

Just in case folks didn't know, a fifth Animatrix short, the one animated by Square (the only other animated feature they did besides the FF movie before shutting down), will be showing theatrically with the Steven King movie Dreamcatcher. This animatrix, The Last Flight of the Osiris, apparently ties together the stories of the Matrix console game and the Matrix Reloaded.

Pretty slick. I think I'm gonna be watching a Steven King movie pretty soon; I don't think I've done that since The Stand.

Re:Overview

[Kirby]

Anime is literally the japanese word for 'animation'. Typically, it's used to mean all animation made in Japan, from Pokemon to Akira. Much like in America, there are several major schools of art, and many of them do have the big eyes, small mouth conventions, which are actually a derivative of early Disney cartoons that inspired early Anime. But there are certainly a number of shows that don't match these conventions. (And even more variety if you try and genre-stereotype - that perception is strongly tied to which shows get translated. There's a lot of anime that has no giant robots or ultra violence or graphic sex!)

Japanimation is a tricky word. Much like 'trekkie', it's hardly ever used in a positive fashion within the fan community. Commonly, it's used by people who don't know the word anime, and think they're more 'hip' than they really are - the calling card of a poser, per se. While I don't recommend judging people too strongly based on them not knowing the nuances of any fannish vocabulary, I do recommend dropping the phrase 'japanimation' from your personal vocabulary entirely, as it's likely to turn some fans against you in an a priori fasion.

And, to muddy the waters, there's a rising number of animated and comic titles made outside of Japan that are strongly in the tradition of anime and manga. (Manga is the Japanese word for Comic Book, though without some of the juvenile implications that we (erroneously) attack to the medium.) Like this Matrix. Or, to really walk the line, the fine comic Usagi Yojimbo, written by Stan Sakai. Despite a Japanese Title, and written by an author who is ethnically Japanse, Mr. Sakai is an American. The comic is written in English, and published in the U.S., but artistically and thematically, it's more kindred with Manga than most Manga.

My feeling is that it's hard to waste time more than arguing over whether or not something is, or is not, anime or manga. There's some content in describing something as in an Anime-style, and even more if one can tell what shows it is similar to, but beyond that, I really want to know if it's good or not. I'd rather spend my time watching great animated work, like Watership Down or Princess Mononoke, than trying to figure out the correct nomenclature. But, geeks love to argue over trivial details, so don't expect good sense to prevail.

Or, the short version: No, it's not technically anime, but it probably appeals to a similar audience.

Re:toon rendering

[Anonymous Coward]

The toon rendering was done using Softimage XSI. It's the same guy who produced 9 of the 10 episodes and did the toon shader development > Michael Arias.

Re:Anyone got the Kazaa dat file?

[Salamanders]

File:program320_dl.mov
Length:28798899Bytes,28124 KB
UUHash:=HNBKAxJJb7mD6JjLFZyHlZL1528=

Low bandwidth version. (kazaa sig2dat)

How about another link?

[CrocOS]

OK So let's give this a go:

All you Mad Mac fans can click here [aol.com] while all you Insane Windows fans can do the same here [aol.com]

Later!

Re:STOP USING FSCKING QUICKTIME!

[Drizzt Do'Urden]

There is a difference between closed standard and closed source.

Quicktime is closed source, but it's an open standard. There is a Open Sourced Quicktime player for Linux, what is not Open is the Sorenson Codec. Sorenson != Quicktime, Sorenson != Apple.

Your post should have been : "Stop using the closed Sorenson Codec".. but you said Quicktime..

This has been repeated countless times on SlashDot.. but it seams you were not aware of it..

Re:Slashdotted already.........

[actor_au]

Ausgamers [ausgamers.com] have a mirror up already, only for Windows guys not Mac and they only have the highest quaility one, but its still good.

Audio format?

[Luke-Jr]

The first episode played fine, but for some reason MPlayer doesn't like the audio in this one? Anyone know how to fix this problem? Bits and pieces of the log: MOV track #1: 2127 chunks, 18746 samples Audio bits: 16 chans: 2 rate: 44100 Audio extra header: len=103 fcc=0x77617665 Fourcc: mp4a -------------- Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding) FAAD: Failed to initialize the decoder! ADecoder init failed :( ADecoder init failed :( *** Try to upgrade /home/luke-jr/.mplayer/codecs.conf from etc/codecs.conf *** If it still does not work, read DOCS/codecs.html! Cannot find codec for audio format 0x6134706D.

Re:Overview

[jacoplane]

Actually, "anime" is not a japanese word at all. "Anime" is the french word for "animated", although no japanese person seems to believe this [wikipedia.org]...

Links to the 640x272 downloads of each episode

[Enucite]

Episode 1 [aol.com]
and
Episode 2 [aol.com]