While the collection of animated short films are housed within the anthology, the individual shorts take place at various points along the Matrix timeline. With four of the nine shorts written by the Wachowskis themselves - writers of The Matrix trilogy - The Animatrix is considered Matrix canon. The Matrix was followed by two more feature films, The Matrix Reloaded (May 2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (November 2003), with the franchise also including an anthology of animated short films released in the middle of the trilogy, titled The Animatrix (June 2003). The film introduced the now well-known redpill/bluepill metaphor for interpreting the world, and asked viewers to consider the similarities of our own reality to that of a computer simulation. The Matrix hit theaters in 1999, and dazzled audiences with a leather-clad and gravity-defying Keanu Reeves, as he, along with Carrie-Anne Moss and Laurence Fishburne, Kung-Fu fight against artificial agents of a programmed reality, and work to free humanity from the grips of a machine-controlled Matrix.
