I think many people would unanimously agree The Second Renaissance parts I and II are the most disturbing episodes in the Animatrix. So what are the most disturbing and memorable images you’ve had of those anime features?
For me though it would have to be the image where the human soldier has his arms and legs torn off as he was being pulled from his mech. Coupled with his cries of help and his scream makes a very disturbing scene.
Same here, its utterly haunting.
shareMy scenes of disturbance:
When robot tears up the guy's face (or was it a woman's face?) I saw it a long time ago so I don't remember
Soldier gets ripped apart from mecha. That was so horrible to watch and hear his cries
Woman robot getting beat up
Robot talking in the white house
Robots experiment on humans
Little boy in snow scene
So what are the most disturbing and memorable images you've had of those anime features?
Preamble: I just rewatched 'Animatrix;' it's probably the third of fourth time I've watched. I can't believe I read all 19 pages of these comments, most of them from 10 years ago. But, some themes are timeless.
The topic: I think the most disturbing thing about 'The Second Renaissance' is that most of the viewers that have commented on here see these images and either consciously or subconsciously admit that this is a possible future for humanity, and that is a terrible thing to consider. This fact makes the various messages hit even harder; the impact is massive. My personal runner-up is the child playing in the snow, then running to his parents to see them turn into agents, and surprise: you are trapped in a machine goo pod with only this attractive Zion Archive UI avatar to comfort you. Bum deal, kid. And of course the analogies and nods to infamous massacres of wars past with brutal imagery reaches out and grabs the student of history.
Main topic aside, there's been a lot of great commentary in this thread:
- The comments about "they're only machines" and so on are chilling to me. It was only in the last century that mass exterminations were carried out on the justification of "the persons of religion X or race Y aren't really humans." There are the same arguments being casually tossed around in this thread, and that is as scary as any of the imagery in 'The Second Renaissance.' What is incredibly revealing are remarks about the woman being beaten, and then her flesh is ripped away to reveal a robotic carapace, and some commenters remark that they immediately lost their empathy. Those were particularly revealing remarks.
- "You don't feel bad when you kick a coke machine." Some people don't feel bad when they murder. What's your point? We are just starting to unlock the mysteries of the human brain, and our best guess is that it's a complicated array of many pattern recognition machines of various strengths [Kurzweil, 'How to Create a Mind'], albeit one composed of organic material--a few neurons and lots of water. I won't delve into esoteric matters of 'the soul' and what-not, needless to say, the human brain and a sufficiently advanced AI brain would have much in common, if they weren't in fact identical. So these remarks of "you don't feel bad when you kick a coke machine" hold zero weight with me.
- This is a possible future for humanity. Consider the pattern. Man dreamt of flight for tens of centuries; now you can travel from New York to London in a small portion of one day. Verne wrote about travel to the Moon. We did it. Billions of people across the globe can access the Internet and communicate nearly instantaneously with others. And we have written about AI, and made movies about AI. The probability that a machine intelligence that meets or exceeds that of a human being created in the next 50 years is probably 80%, or greater, in my opinion. With the benefit of ten years since the bulk of these comments were made, I can recall recent instances of Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) and Bill Gates warning us in the press about the potential (emphasis: potential) dangers of AI. When minds of this caliber offer warnings, we had best listen and take heed. This is to say nothing of the most meticulously constructed guard against humanity's demise at the hands of malevolent robots: Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Boom. Done.
I just watched it for the first time in netflix. I agree with the poster on the disturbing scenes. However there is one scene that struck with me and gives me chills when I think about it.
After the machines have virtually won the war, one of them approaches the world leaders in the United Nations. That speech where it says that humans will now enter a new existence, or something like that, and that they demand it gives me the chills. You can see the faces of fear and resignation from the world leaders as they know that their dominion of the planet is over. They are slaves to the machines. And then the whole thing explodes.
The whole sequence gave me a feeling of hopelessness and sadness. Very well executed!
There were a few disturbing moments for me. First was the female robot being destroyed by a group of men who do it with such pleasure, grinning and laughing as she begs for mercy. Then that notorious mech-ripping scene... and there's a moment where a robot is poking around inside a still-living person's brain, messing with his emotions. Pretty much all of the war scenes are oppressive and Hellish, which I guess was the intent. But gawd dayum, it's still PG-13... guess you can get away with just about anything as long as you leave out the blood and F-bombs.
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