The Animatrix & Ghost in the Shell 2 (Wk 11, 16th Dec 2011)

[Haruhiist]

Well that was an odd night...quite easily my least favourite and quite easily my favourite of this semester's anime shown back-to-back!

I found The Animatrix very mediocre. I just found it terribly uneven with some of the shorts being very good and some of the shorts being painful. Its highlights for me were the two-part The Second Renaissance and also the charming Beyond (personally I prefer all three of these to The Matrix), whereas the lowpoints were the terrible, silly World Record and the videogame-esque Final Flight of the Osiris.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence on the other hand blew me away! I was very surprised and very pleased by quite how much I enjoyed it. The atmosphere is rich and utterly captivating, whilst the animation looks stunning, and I found some of the content fascinating. Watching this really makes me want to give the first Ghost in the Shell movie another go (I was never much of a fan of the original movie, but if watching GitS2 is any indication I think I might like it a lot more now).

What did everyone else think? ^_^

[KingJ]

The Animatrix was not as good as I was expecting. That said, it was interesting to see all of the different types of animation. I think Beyond (the glitched "Haunted House") was my favourite story.

GitS2 was... odd. Definitely comes close to Paprika levels of WTF. While the animation was pretty decent, I dislike the combination of 3D models and animation.

[SittingDuck]

I dunno, I quite liked the 3D models, they were done well and merged in a lot better than most 3D attempts in anime, especially for something made in 2004. Still, can't help but wonder how much the budget would have been reduced by if they hadn't done the scenic parade with it....

[Haruhiist]

Normally I really dislike mixing 3d and 2d animation too (other than GitS2 I can't think of a single example I've seen that hasn't looked bad), but I thought it was really effective in GitS2 adding to the strange atmosphere of the film and I really liked it in scenes like the parade scene mentioned above which I found absolutely breathtaking.

[Lisey]

^ I concur with the above statements. I didn't notice they were 3D >.< Stupid as that sounds but when I was watching it it seemed to blend and flow very well ^_^ bonus I know what KJ means though as I have seen examples of 3D v 2D which looks decidedly odd O.o

Soundtrack is pretty cool too and just serves to, as you say, add to the weirdness of the film

Animatrix, again I liked to see the differing animation styles ^_^ Favourite was probably 'Matriculated', and 'The Renaissance' ... although 'Beyond' was just cool And I liked the style of 'Program' (so many colours!) but the story fell off a bit :/ All in all I didn't think it was terrible

EDIT
The subs were terrible