What do you think of this fact?
Green characters raining down a black screen: few images say 1999 sci-fi quite like the code in The Matrix. What’s behind it is far less mysterious than it looks.
A designer, a cookbook and a pen
The code was designed by Simon Whiteley, a production designer at the effects studio Animal Logic. In an interview with the effects site befores & afters, he explained that he drew the characters by hand himself. His templates: Japanese cookbooks and the Japanese alphabet books his kids used at school. According to SYFY, the cookbook belonged to his Japanese wife.
Whiteley went with katakana, one of the Japanese syllabic scripts, because he liked its “very nice simple strokes.” Kanji and hiragana were too intricate for him. He mixed the characters with Arabic numerals, added strokes, dots and icons, and flipped a lot of it back to front, so the code looks as if you were seeing it from the inside, just like Neo.
Why the code rains
At first, the characters ran across the screen horizontally. But the text in the Japanese cookbooks ran from top to bottom, so the team turned the code vertical. Whiteley said the falling columns looked like rain, which made the whole thing more atmospheric.
And the sushi? According to SYFY, Whiteley told CNET in 2017 that the code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes. befores & afters notes that Japanese fans have searched the code for sushi and recipes. So treat the sushi part as his favorite line, not as a decoded menu.
Bonus fact: According to Whiteley, the green matches the text on old IBM CRT monitors.
One of the most famous effects in science fiction started with a cookbook.