The complete Aeon Flux collection has finally arrived on DVD in all it’s restored, remastered 5.1 glory.  All I can say is; it’s about bloody time!  For years the only Aeon Flux we had on DVD were a few short episodes on an MTV compilation called Liquid Shorts.  Liquid Shorts was a hand picked best-of collection of the animated features that appeared on Liquid Television.  MTV broadcast Liquid Television way back in ’91 and easily its best feature was the anarcho-assassin named Aeon Flux.  Liquid Television was a boon to comic and anime geeks of the era, it was creative, groundbreaking with an artistic integrity unseen on MTV and would certainly never be seen again.  Every type of animation imaginable form claymation, paper cutout, drawn, black and white, pencil and paper, doll animation were all used to spliced together a collage of cultural references that probably appealed most to pot smoking young adults with short attention spans.  Aeon Flux the best feature and the reason you tuned in.  The early episodes were silent, fast paced adventures lasting no more than two minutes each.  Aeon was a nimble female assassin, deadly and lethal but she met many an untimely demise in the Orwellian sci-fi nightmare world she occupied.  Each episode challenged the viewer, the story was beyond unpredictable, it was often confusing but the viewer wasn’t always supposed to know exactly what was going on, this was the beauty of it.  It took place in a future where technologies and natural phenomena are surreal, sometimes with unusual sexual overtones.  You may simply decide this isn’t Earth at all but some realm inside the imagination of Peter Chung, and you’d probably be right. 

What Peter Chung’s animation lacked in anatomy was more than compensated with his unique vision and cinematic direction.  He was truly visionary railing against the animated status quo of the day using shots and perspectives not possible on film at the time, his camera floated with characters and even shifted from one character to another.  Chung was breaking all the rules of animation that had come before.  It’s easy to see how it must have left an impression on the Wachowski brothers.  Similarities to the perspectives and esthetic used in the Matrix are apparent right down to the black leather clad femme fatale leaping from buildings and through windows rapid firing weapons.  Aeon Flux was a predecessor to the bullet time perspective that would influence film and video games for years after the first Matrix.  Chung’s animation dutifully played with perspectives showing us weapons fire from inside the barrel or hand to hand combat literally from under the chin or a fist eye view.  It was the Wachowski brothers Matrix that marked the era in cinematography that had finally caught up to what had been possible in Chung’s anime.  It’s fitting Chung would be asked to add his sinewy, despondent style to an episode of the Animatrix, a collection of animated shorts that take place in the nightmarish future world of the Matrix.  Chung’s “Matriculated” is the final, most surreal, most loved and hated episode of the Animatrix.

Aeon Flux; The Complete Animated Collection is a three disc set.  Disc one and two share all ten of the talkie episodes that appeared through the autumn of 1995.  These later episodes finally gave a voice to Aeon making her more accessible and less mysterious, MTV’s attempt to open the stories to a wider audience.  Fortunately even the talkies retained the provocative challenge that made intelligent viewing.  Disc Three (which should have been disc one) consists of the original non-talking short episodes that appeared on Liquid Television in ’91.  Special features on disc one include a few featurettes including the insightful “History of Aeon Flux”.  In History-of, we get to see Peter Chung talk about developing the character and the world.  We also see short dialogues with the writers and producers of the show.  They even joke that they slipped a lot of questionable sexual innuendo and explicit situations, thinly disguised beneath dreamlike artistry, past the MTV execs who gave approval because they simply didn’t get it.  Another key special feature is a collection of Liquid Television shorts.  These give you that flavor of where the original episodes come from.  There are also a bunch of trailers for other features by MTV that juxtapose the height MTV once reached for a short time producing Aeon Flux.  The trailers are a barrage of ads for features of dumb people rolling in poop or making themselves puke.

The DVD feature arrives in time to whet your appetite for Charlize Theron in the Aeon Flux garb.  The Aeon Flux movie is coming mid December and although I don’t expect much, it would be nice if they manage to aim a little higher than the straight up action flick, perhaps they could delve into some of the more bizarre elements of this futuristic world.  The film is truly another case of borrowed media coming full circle.  From Aeon Flux’s influential anime contributing to Wochowski brothers’ vision in film, now Aeon will have her own movie and of course an obligatory video game.