[7.4/10] Let’s take these segment by segment.

**The Second Renaissance**: The word that comes to mind is “chilling.” Having seen this one before, it was lighter on details than I remembered. We learn the basics: humanity attacking their mechanical helpers, a robot revolt and exodus, a thriving artificial community, a war between man and machine, and a blotting out of the sun that results in mankind’s subjugation. But it’s much lighter on details than I’d remembered. Instead, the short depicts these events through images, symbols, bits of iconography that convey the mood and tone of this epochal shift in the nature of Earth more than the finer points.

It’s a mode that works. The brutality of war, the brutality exhibited by man and machine alike, muddy the waters of the moral crusade that takes place in *The matrix*. It’s easy to see the machines as the enemy given what our heroes suffer in the mainline Matrix movies. But no one’s hands are clean in this, with cruelty offered and returned on all sides.

There’s no shortage of horrifying images here, from a robotic woman being stripped and beaten while declaring “I’m real”, to skulls crushed by mechanical fingers, to children tucked into pods as their parents fade away, to a giant robotic insect insisting humanity “surrender our flesh” because “we demand it.” This is a short that thrives on its aesthetic and almost psychedelic horrors as the world devolves into the dystopia of The Matrix, and it’s more effect as a mood piece, giving you the feel of envy, oppression, misery, and most of all horror at the root of this conflict. It’s easily the best part for me.

**Kid’s Story**: I take issue with this one a bit. I’m not one for big moral judgments about art, but it’s not hard to see this as romanticizing suicide. I doubt many young folks watching will jump off of buildings expecting to wake up in “another world” -- but it does dramatize that idea in florid, epic tones that makes it seem bold and transcendent. I don’t mind it as a story, but at the risk of being a “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”-type person, I worry about the message it sent to disaffected young folks watching it, myself included. That said, the animation is particularly cool, fluid but grainy and unfinished in a way that blends realism and exaggeration. And the concept of self-substantiation is a neat way to go here, adding some depth to “Kid” from *The Matrix Reloaded* in the process.

**The Last Flight of the Osiris**: Man is this one horny. This short is the most direct precursor to the events of *Reloaded* and *Revolutions*, and it’s fine in that regard. The 3D animation hasn’t aged especially well, and the leering gaze (granted, one trained on both male and female bodies) feels unnecessary. The escape from sentinels in the real world while someone races against time to achieve something important in the digital world is standard *Matrix* block and tackle now, so there’s not much to write home about there either. There’s nothing wrong with this one exactly, but it’s the most standard and generic entry of the bunch, which works against it, even as it’s the one that's most directly tied into the films it was produced alongside.