| Beyond (the Animatrix) |
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'' Beyond '' is a Short Film that is one of nine Animatrix films. Beyond deals with a group of kids who stumble across an amalgamation of spatial anomalies within a dilapidated and abandoned building, indicatively somewhere in Japan. The kids learn to exploit the major glitch in the Matrix for their own enjoyment. The building contains several areas which seem to defy real world physics. One such area is a large open area in the middle of the building where the kids take turns jumping off a high point, freefalling towards the ground yet stopping inches above the floor as if held up by an imaginary force. They are amused by this activity and seem not eager to question why it is happening. The jumping activity seems to be painless, although one boy notices that his nose starts to bleed after coming to a halt inches above the ground. It is not revealed what causes this, but it is taken by some to be related to how conscious minds inside the Matrix try to make things 'real'. The boy knows it shouldn't be possible for him to be able to jump from such a high ledge, and therefore his nose starts to bleed even though he has not impacted the ground. Other anomalies occur within the building, such as the glass bottles breaking and falling back together in one piece, clearly broken lightbulbs flickering on briefly seeming to be perfectly intact, and a feather that lands on the ground moving...digitally. Before long, agents and men dressed like HAZMAT workers show up to eradicate the "problem" -- permanently. ''Beyond'' is directed by Koji Morimoto (of Macross Plus and Akira fame). (A sign on a building in the background of one scene near the end of the short reads Otis, the name of an art and design school in Los Angeles.) The 'glitches' are insightfully creative in combining everyday parts of the real world with the signs and symptoms computers exhibit when things aren't working properly. The motions of the feather, for example are clearly suggestive of the results when computer game physics engines encounter bugs or unanticipated situations that the program can't handle gracefully. Other computer errors depicted suggest graphical rendering issues such as data corruption, broken links in the structure between virtual areas or failure to access the relevant data, and video buffer problems. VOICE ACTORS
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