That Trippy Green Code in ‘The Matrix’ Is Just a Bunch of Sushi Recipes
Mystery solved!
The first few minutes of
The Matrix (1999) are ominous and
disorienting: a torrent of lime-green characters trickle down and then
jam the frame. From afar, it looks like utterly indecipherable code; If
you peer closely, however you'll be able to discern that it's a jumble
of Japanese characters:
hiragana,
katakana, and
kanji.
The Wachowskis, who directed the movie, have opened every subsequent film within the
Matrix franchise with this sequence. You could even consider the green techno-rain the series' defining imagistic attribute.
For those of us who've found it impossible to get a handle on what,
exactly, is gushing onto the screen, though, I've got news: As it turns
out, we've been played.
The man behind the code is Simon
Whiteley, who worked as a production designer on the film. In an
interview with CNet last Thursday, Whiteley
revealed
that the source of that mystifying code was none other than a batch of
his Japanese wife's cookbooks—and the sushi recipes he found within
them.
"I like to tell everybody that
The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," Whiteley, who's also lent his design talents to
Babe (1995) and
The Lego Movie (2014), told the publication. "Without that code, there is no Matrix."
(Vice.com)
