From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Detective Story is an animated short film written and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe for The Animatrix anthology film. The film follows Ash, a detective called to hunt down the notorious hacker Trinity.
Detective Story follows the story of a down-on-his-luck private detective, Ash, on what he calls the "case to end all cases". Ash receives an anonymous phone call to search for a hacker that goes by the alias "Trinity". Ash traces Trinity learning that other detectives have failed in the same task before him, one had committed suicide, one had gone missing, and one has gone insane.
Eventually Ash finds Trinity after deducing that he should communicate using phrases and facts from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She proposes a meeting, and he successfully finds the location. At the meeting she removes a "bug" from his eye, planted by agents earlier in one of his "eye exam dreams." Agents appear and attempt to apprehend Trinity, which leads to a shootout between the Agents and Ash and Trinity. While trying to escape the train an agent attempts to take Ash's body, forcing Trinity to shoot him in order to prevent the agent from appearing and taking over his body. While Ash is wounded, he and Trinity bid their farewells with no hard feelings. Trinity escapes telling Ash that she thinks he could have handled the truth. Agents enter the car to find Ash, who points his gun at them while looking in the other direction and lighting a cigarette. The Agents turn to Ash who, even though he is armed, will likely die. With this apparent no-win situation, the film ends with Ash's line ("A case to end all cases") as his lighter flame going out.
[edit] Characters
Detective Story is designed to imitate the appearance of film noir. It is all black-and-white with grainy photographic backgrounds. The aesthetic of the piece is highly Art Deco and thirties-retro, with the computers blended with typewriters to give it an old-fashioned yet modern feel, and the phones using a rotary-dial system.
[edit] External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
