When I was a child I was obsessed with The Matrix. I watched every film, played every game, took up judo in the hope I would learn to fight like its stars, and did basically everything a ten-year-old does to emulate their favourite movie heroes.
It was the great action series of my childhood. But there was one story in it I loved for very different reasons.
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The Animatrix is a collection of short films, nine in all, made by very different animators exploring the possibilities of the series’ world. They range from “The Second Renaissance,” a nightmarish telling of the history of the machines and why humanity totally had it coming, which traumatized me badly as a kid, to noir detective pastiches and miniature sports dramas. But one film grabbed me more than the others back then.
“Beyond” is a short about a girl called Yoko who goes looking one day for her missing cat. She finds her in an abandoned building, where several younger children have found a glitch in the matrix and are playing around with it. They smash bottles on the ground which reform and fly into the air, they leap from ledges and stop inches from the floor. Yoko’s cat plays outside with the shadows of nonexistent people.
At twelve I loved this film as a magical slice of life story, a day in the life of people living in this world and the amazing things they got up to. I don’t remember ever feeling it had a moral, when the matrix’s bug fixing crew turn up under the guise of pest control I was disappointed they got rid of everything but never thought about it as more than a sad ending.
Rewatching it as an adult was a whole new experience. The story, I found, was not in fact just an entertaining little story tucked between the much more dramatic parts of the anthology. It was a parable about growing up.
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The children play in this magical land which the land of adults then takes away from them, and when they return to where it used to be years later they find nothing left. Nothing floats in the air anymore, or springs back together and into their hands. Yoko picks up and drops an old can to check and not only does it not float but it cuts her finger.
But more than that what I felt in rewatching it was the same as what those children felt at the end. As a child the world seems to stretch on forever and your mind imbues stories you love with infinite mythologies and possibilities. The world of The Matrix seemed to me just that, an endless universe of people living out their lives and going about their days, in a way that now, rewatching as an adult, was no longer there.
“Beyond” to me now feels a smaller story, as all stories do to an adult. It is a self-contained parable about aging, about how the world seems to shrink and lose its possibilities when you get older. And it is a strangely fitting story to discover that through, just as Yoko did.
