Kid's Story (2003)

Best movie ever!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

There's not much plot to this Animatrix short, but the movies overcompensated for that so it's good to have a Matrix story sold on imagery and feeling.Remember the overeager kid from The Matrix Revolutions? This is the story of how he freed himself from un-real world and woke up. He feels alone and alienated, wondering why his dreams feel more real than his waking world.Cowboy Beebop director Shinichirô Watanabe uses abstract, experimental animation deliver the story. It's rough and features many pencil strokes, but it's good. Not the best Animatrix short, but worth watching.

This is a bizarre one. The animation, especially of the fall, is intensely surreal though not necessarily to a dream-like effect. It's hard in some places to get one's bearings while viewing the movie, but that's kind of the point and a lot of the character design and movement is purposefully chaotic and fractured.It's been a while since I watched the Matrix sequels, but I'm pretty sure "Popper" is the kid who appears as Neo's little fanboy in the movies. If that's the case, it's neat to see his story, and bizarre to think about how it may have come to place. On the other hand, I can't help but get giggles thinking that some extreme Matrix fans with no sense of reality could use this story as direction and try to jump off of high buildings to escape the virtual world. On a more serious note, I'm glad that hasn't happened, because it's not like we need another reason to blame movies for stupid people's actions.Enough of what isn't. What is is that this animation is a really neat speculation on alternative ways people can come to escape The Matrix, alongside of the other short featured in somewhat of the same style, "The World Record." --PolarisDiB --PolarisDiB

one of two of the nine Animatrix shorts connected directly to the first movie sequel Reloaded, this explains what the kid pestering Neo in Zion was on about. It reveals his escape from the matrix, which involves him asking questions on his computer and getting a cryptic reply, black screen, green typing, like Neo's white rabbit chat in the Matrix. at school, his phone rings, and his teacher confronts him when he is told off but it rings a second time and he answers.he is warned to escape, which he does, with some interesting slippery animation depicting him skateboarding through his school, chased by his teacher and a whole bunch of agents. he is cornered and climbs out of a window to the roof. the short began with the kid dreaming of a suicidal jump from a rooftop, which the kid performs after asserting his belief in Neo.his funeral is attended by his teacher who talks of delusions and of the real world being a scary place to the kid. then the kid wakes in the real world as Neo and Trinity discuss his self substantiation and Neo tells the kid he saved himself when the kid tells Neo he saved him, something annoyingly repeated in Reloaded and Revolutions.Keanu and Carrie voicing their characters add a welcome authenticity to the short, and the animation by Studio 4°C combines rubbery pencils and colours with seemingly real world, photo-realistic backgrounds, a dualistic reference to the distinction between the real world and the matrix, surely a consciously chosen style of animation for that purpose, if not then an interesting coincidence. Shinichiro Watanabe of cowboy bebop fame directs this worthy effort and matrix enthusiasts should enjoy the escapist fiction and revel in the truth of the kid's story.

This is not the best of the animatrix series. The artwork is sub par and the story is quite thin. What saves it is the believable feeling of paranoia and the end scene in the graveyard.*SPOILER*When one teacher says to another (from memory):"Some kids are so insecure they need to make up some safe place where they can escape to" <looks towards the sky/heaven>. "but he will be better of where he is now". That comment and the nice rendering of how the adult was completely unaware what he was saying about his own religious beliefs really enthralled me. I had to replay the scene multiple times before going on.