It has been ages since I watched this (Though I did do a write up on The Second Renaissance a couple of years back), but I did remember this particular short to be one of my favorites from the compilation.
But to start off, The Animatrix was an animated anthology film that came out in 2003, shortly before The Matrix Reloaded was shown in theaters. It comprises of 9 different stories (Also animated and directed by different people) detailing the backstory of the Matrix universe, such as how it came to be when war broke out between man and machine.
The storyline for A Detective Story focuses on a detective trying to make end's meet and so unknowingly accepts a case given to him by one of the Agents to find the hacker known as Trinity, things obviously do not end well once he succeeds in finding her though…
Now… you are going to hate me for this part, when I had first watched this as a kid, I had liked it for pretty shallow reasons, such as how much more attractive and realistic the characters (I mean look at Trinity for crying out loud!) looked as compared to the characters in the other shorts. And possibly the worst part was the fact that I hadn't even known about Shinichiro Watanabe at the time, or what the noir genre even was. I had liked this short simply for its hot characters when I was young.
On the bright side however, as I grew older, I did come to appreciate this short a whole lot more (Along with the other shorts, that had originally terrified me when I first watched them), the style was still incredibly stylish and gorgeous to me (A mixture of art deco and other Thirties art styles) and I still really liked how they blended old and modern technology together in various parts of the short, so to still give this considerably traditional noir styled short a modern feel (Like the computer-typewriter and the phone with the rotary dial system), that's Watanabe for you!
And of course there is the animation, done by Kazuto Nakazawa, known for working on the animation sequence for Kill Bill 1 and Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit music video, Nakazawa was the man who worked on the key animations for this short as well as Kid's Story (Another Animatrix short), there was always something about his animation style that I really liked, it felt like an odd mixture of fluidity and a very, very slight bit of rigidness (Am I making sense here?), it felt pretty unique to me, and I just found it highly appealing, especially when I see it used on more realistically drawn animations.
This will always be one of my favorites, because it was definitely one of the better animated and designed shorts alongside The Second Renaissance and Beyond.
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