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Fremont is my adopted city. I moved to this East Bay city soon after I got married a few years ago. Previous to this I lived, studied and worked in San Francisco. There was a period where I also lived in San Pablo but I practically spent all my waking hours in the City by the Bay.

Before moving to Fremont, I viewed this city 50 miles from Frisco rather disparagingly. It was always that far-away suburban town where nothing happened. It has none of the cultural significance and excitement of San Francisco. Its night life is virtually non-existent. The better malls and theaters are found in neighboring towns. So as you can imagine my move to Fremont was accompanied with some trepidation. But I did it for the wife anyway. She grew up here and wanted to stay close to her family.

It took me awhile to get acclimated to Fremont. My first couple of years living here I still held a job in downtown San Francisco, commuting there everyday by BART. The transition to becoming a full-fledged Fremont man came when I found work locally at the HQ of a wireless retailer. I believe the Lord had gradually taken me away from the city that had been host to the decadent, hedonistic lifestyle of my bachelor days. No longer was I to be exposed to the temptations of a place that took focus away from the things that mattered in life.

That is why the move to Fremont turned out to be a blessing. The City of Fremont is a family-oriented community, and as such, it fits me and my family quite nicely. It actually has a lot going for it. Really. Aside from being in the Silicon Valley where tech jobs can be found, it was named the “best city in America to raise children” and it ranks as one of the top 10 safest cities to live in the U.S. Having started as an agricultural town, Fremont is an odd mixture of residential areas, farm land and high tech business parks. It has become a favorite test bed for technologies such as cable internet service, digital cable and digital phone lines. It has also grown to be one of the most diverse communities in the Bay Area, being home to a large number of Asian immigrants mostly from India and China (many Filipinos live in adjacent Union City).

Here are other interesting facts about Fremont:

• Cyberdyne Systems, the building blown up in T2, is located in Fremont
• Charlie Chaplin shot many of his films, including The Tramp, in the Niles district of Fremont
• Kristi Yamaguchi hails from Fremont
• MC Hammer’s infamous $12 million mansion is located in Fremont (can’t touch this)
• home to the largest Afghan community in the US (dubbed Little Kabul)
• Leland Stanford, former governor of California and resident of Fremont, considered Fremont as a possible site for Stanford University (oh how that would’ve changed Fremont!)
• Dumbarton Bridge, which connects Fremont to the Peninsula, is the first built of the Bay’s seven bridges, pre-dating both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge
• Puck from MTV’s Real World is from Fremont (not a good thing)

I worked next door to Cyberdyne Systems and didn’t even know it. I always knew the building that was blown up in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was somewhere in Fremont, CA but didn’t know exactly where. It turns out that during all the years I worked at ePhones on Bayside Parkway, I was working next to the building that was featured in the movie. I only realized this when I watched T2 once again on DVD recently. I visited the site today and took some pictures.

Here’s the front of the building:

Here’s a still from the movie clearly showing the three-tiered portico of the building:

This is me and one of my sons in front of the old ePhones building (now empty) next door. The ePhones building shares the same form factor as the Cyberdyne Systems building. You’ll see that the door is similar to the one that Ahhnold comes out of.

I’ll blog some other time about another movie star who shot many movies in Fremont. *grin*

Just saw the Animatrix on DVD. All I can say is “whoa!” Keanu-style. It’s some of the most amazing animation I’ve seen since, well, hmmm…Spirited Away. It contains 9 anime shorts by various directors done in varied styles, all centering around the Matrix mythos.

Animatrix opens with Final Flight of the Osiris by the folks who did Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. Because it’s done in realistic 3D style, it could have easily been incorporated into the Matrix movies (but come to think of it, the 3D generated people incorporated into Matrix Reloaded lent it an unbelievable, wooden feel. Bah.).

The Wachowskis have a penchant of taking not entirely new themes and using them in their films. The Second Renaissance (parts I & II), the second set of shorts, is no different. It tells of the pre-history of the Matrix movies. Seeing how the Matrix came to be gives you the familiar feeling you’ve seen all this before. The way the machines take over the world is so derivative that movies like Terminator and A.I could fit nicely into the Matrix universe. In all fairness, all these movies are, to a certain degree, probably based on Asimov’s Laws of Robotics (or what goes wrong when these laws are broken).

Kid’s Story and Detective Story are wildly experimental shorts done by Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe. The high school building in Kid’s Story is modeled after local Alameda High School. The kinetic, hand-drawn style is the most un-anime technique I’ve seen from a Japanese animator. Detective Story is a nice black and white noir piece that only further extends parallelisms between the magnificent Dark City and the Matrix. This time, we’ve also got investigators going crazy after finding out “the truth.”

Program is the most traditional anime short of the bunch. It’s beautifully drawn by the animator behind cutting-edge Neo Tokyo and Wicked City. It’s like watching Samurai Jack meets the Matrix.

The young animator behind World Record is clearly influenced by Peter Chung, director of Matriculation and the now-classic Aeon Flux. But he definitely brings something new and raw to the world of anime. Expect him to do the next Nike commercial or a future KRS-One video.

Beyond is perhaps the first anime where “rotoscoping” is used, a traditional Disney or Bakshi technique where live actors are used as reference or directly drawn over to give characters life-like movements.

Finally, Matriculation by American-born Peter Chung, who gave us Aeon Flux, weaves an “anti-Matrix” tale - inviting robots into the human mind. I’m glad to see Chung further honing his skills and improving his craft. This story is like a Heavy Metal strip come to life. It reminds me of parts of “The Incal” by Moebius and Jodorowski on which “The Fifth Element” is loosely based.

Chung probably needed a break from animating the Rugrats.

“The Matrix” has come full circle. When it first came out it was said to be an homage to the craft of fine Japanese animation. Now the Wachowski brothers have given the masters of anime an opportunity to tell the Matrix story with their own paintbrush.