Matrix code: Japanese cookbooks become digital rain
Green symbols descend across a dark screen, leaving fading trails behind them. The Matrix code began with a designer looking through Japanese cookbooks at home. Simon Whiteley's wife, Miki, owned the volumes that gave him the lettering and page layouts he needed. He drew selected characters by hand and worked with programmer Justen Marshall to turn them into the falling display. Printed cooking material became the starting point for an image that would introduce a movie about a computer-generated reality, with a handmade design hidden inside its mechanical appearance.
The Wachowski siblings wanted a title design that felt simple, traditional, and Japanese, reflecting their admiration for Japanese animation and martial arts films. They had rejected an earlier approach because it did not convey the quality they wanted. Whiteley was invited to try, partly because Miki could help him understand the Japanese characters and choose suitable ones. He worked at Animal Logic in Australia, where the effects team collaborated with the directors, producers Barrie Osborne and Andrew Mason, and production designer Owen Paterson. His assignment sat within a larger production effort linking visual design to the filmmakers' imagined world.
Katakana gave Whiteley the clean, simple forms he was looking for. He drew some characters and combined them with Arabic numerals and punctuation marks, also drawn by hand. Scanning brought the shapes into the computer, and Marshall wrote a script to move them randomly in lines. Each line had a lighter leading edge before the symbols faded. Building the Matrix code therefore involved two different kinds of work: making individual marks and controlling how they behaved together. The drawing stage determined their appearance, while the program gave the screen its changing rhythm and the trails that followed each moving line.
Whiteley chose green to suggest the phosphor glow of older CRT monitors. He felt that the color suited the makeshift interior of the Nebuchadnezzar and the timeless quality the directors wanted. But the first animation still left him dissatisfied. The characters moved across the screen without producing the emotion he hoped for. He went home and looked again at the cookbooks and magazines. Their pages offered more than letter shapes: much of the writing ran downward in lines, and the layouts followed a direction different from the one used in his initial animation. The physical arrangement of the printed words suggested a new movement.
He asked Marshall to send the symbols down the screen and flip them, as though the image were being seen from inside the code looking outward. The change transformed the effect for Whiteley. He found it lyrical and melancholic, resembling rain traveling down a window. The Matrix code had found its downward flow through a return to the same household material that inspired the marks. The work joined the visual influence of Japanese typography to the changing light of a computer display, creating an emotional quality from a comparatively simple adjustment in the direction of motion.
The cookbook connection later became widely expressed as a story about sushi recipes. Whiteley liked imagining cooking instructions swimming among the symbols, but Miki offered a different possibility. Sushi recipes normally use kanji or hiragana, while his display was stylized as katakana. She suggested teriyaki or ramen instead. Whiteley also explained that Japanese speakers could not simply extract a recipe from the moving screen. The characters had been selected, redrawn, mixed with other marks, and animated. The design retained its connection to cooking pages without functioning as instructions that could be lifted directly from the film and used in a kitchen.
Whiteley kept the particular volume's identity private. In an interview with WIRED, he said that naming it would give away a remaining piece of magic. He did offer a clue: it was a magazine called a book, something many Japanese people would have heard of or kept on a shelf. Miki still owned it, although it was beginning to fall apart. Whiteley later worked on effects for The Lego Ninjago Movie and Peter Rabbit, yet expressed surprise that the relatively simple Matrix code remained the most prominent and lasting of his designs. Its physical inspiration remained in the household where he had first browsed it.
Released in March 1999, The Matrix starred Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson, also known as Neo, a programmer and hacker who discovers the artificial nature of his surroundings. Animal Logic's work extended across a fifteen-month collaboration involving a hundred effects. The team made the opening trace program, displays for monitors and other devices, and the three agents Neo sees as code in a hotel corridor. It also created white-hot flashes of energy for gunfire. The title's falling symbols belonged to a wider set of effects that gave the film's hidden digital world a visible presence in screens, figures, and bursts of light.
- Twenty years of The Matrix: Ausfilm — www.ausfilm.com.au
- The Matrix Code Came From Sushi Recipes: WIRED — www.wired.com
- The Matrix: how the Wachowskis changed sci-fi — www.bfi.org.uk