2003’s overlooked animated anthology movie The Animatrix only added to the legend of Carrie-Anne Moss’ character Trinity established by the live-action Matrix films. Written and produced by The Wachowskis for online release immediately after The Matrix Reloaded and before The Matrix Revolutions, The Animatrix features nine non-chronological animated shorts directed by some of the franchise creators’ favorite anime filmmakers.

Two of the shorts, in particular, focus on Trinity’s backstory, making her even cooler than when she appeared on the big screen in the original live-action Matrix trilogy. “A Detective Story” serves up the kind of coded messages and escapology the feature films lead you to expect from Trinity. Her minor role in “Kid’s Story”, meanwhile, portrays her hero status almost on a par with Neo.

The Animatrix’s “A Detective Story” Shows How Big Of A Threat Trinity Was To The Machines

She Was Impossible To Catch And Unbeatable As A Hacker

Although Trinity isn’t the protagonist of “A Detective Story,” her reputation precedes her as she becomes the focus of hard-boiled private investigator Mr Ash for virtually all the short’s 10 minutes. “This Trinity was well-known in hacker circles, a real artist by the sound of it,” Ash recounts. He also makes the same mistake Neo did in the first Matrix before meeting Trinity, by ᴀssuming she’s male. This indicator of rampant misogyny might not be quite as valid 20 years on from when The Animatrix was first released, but it still has the ring of truth about it.

Ultimately, though, it’s just one more example of the fear and respect Trinity invokes in anyone trying to catch her. Ash tells us that three detectives before him had been hired to track her down, with each one of them suffering a catastrophic fate. “One of the guys killed himself, another disappeared, another went crazy.” This track record only enhances Trinity’s reputation as a fearsome warrior inside the Matrix, and an ingenious hacker in the real world.

Even Ash himself doesn’t manage to find her without her giving him a big helping hand. Just as she instructs Neo to “follow the white rabbit” in The Matrix, Trinity introduces herself to Ash with references to Alice in Wonderland. She calls herself the “Red Queen” and tells him, “It is you who are through the looking glᴀss.” These coded messages are designed to help Ash, who Trinity is actually trying to “save”, as she explains to him later in the film. They illustrate the extent to which she’s one step ahead of those trying to catch her, and often aware of the danger those around her are in before they are.

“A Detective Story” Makes Trinity’s Iconic Introduction In The Matrix Even Better

It Perfectly Sets Up The Police Chase At The Start Of The Movie

In relation to the rest of the Matrix franchise, “A Detective Story” is set some time before the action starts in the first feature film. If you were viewing everything in chronological order, you’d watch it before The Matrix itself. The animated short suggests that the Agents had already been tailing Trinity for some time before we see her leading two police units astray and disappearing from a phone box at the start of the first movie.

It also includes a train chase sequence that mirrors the kind of death-defying live-action stunts Moss described as a “challenge” for her in a recent interview with Collider. Trinity exits the story by crashing through the moving train’s window, proving she’s the character we know and love from the moment she dives off a rooftop, down a staircase, and points two gun barrels at the audience during The Matrix’s first action sequence.

Trinity Also Plays A Role In The Animatrix’s “Kid’s Story” Episode

She Cements Her Place As One Of The Franchise’s Main Heroes

As well as “A Detective Story”, Trinity turns up in another of The Animatrix’s shorts. “Kid’s Story” provides some background for the Matrix character Kid, who appears in Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions as a young boy who’s managed to free himself from the Matrix and is a willing soldier for the humans in the First Machine War. In the anime, the Kid comes into contact with Neo before being chased out of his school by Agents and plunging to his death inside the Matrix.

Trinity first appears as one of the names scrawled on Kid’s exercise book as he sits in his classroom. We then see her shadow as he begins to regain consciousness in the real world. “His vitals are good, he’s gonna make it,” she says. “It’s unbelievable. I didn’t think self-substantiation was possible,” she adds, referring to the process by which Kid has freed himself from the Matrix without the help of others. “Apparently it is,” Neo replies. The two of them are side-by-side, jointly sharing the role of humankind’s savior. Neo might have been the One, but, as The Animatrix underlines, he would have been no one without Trinity.