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| - While Simon Whiteley, the production designer behind the code, claims to have used his wife's Japanese cookbooks to help create the design ...
... the Japanese characters were mixed with other symbols and heavily stylized for artistic effect.
For years, a rumor circulated on social media that the iconic green, falling, digital code seen in the film "The Matrix" consisted of Japanese sushi recipes. "The green falling code in The Matrix is just loads of sushi recipes," one Instagram post (archived) read.
The post's description read:
The iconic green falling code in *The Matrix* may seem like a deep, mysterious symbol of the virtual world, but in reality, it's based on something far simpler—sushi recipes. Simon Whiteley, the designer behind the code, revealed that he scanned characters from his wife's Japanese cookbooks to create the now-famous digital rain. The text is actually a combination of Japanese katakana, numbers, and letters. What was meant to represent complex code is really just food, blending the mundane with the profound, which aligns with *The Matrix*'s theme of reality not being what it seems.
Similar claims circulated on other social media platforms, including Reddit, iFunny, 9GAG, and YouTube.
In short, although the claim holds some validity, it's not entirely accurate. Simon Whiteley, the production designer behind the Matrix code, has stated that he drew inspiration from his wife's Japanese cookbooks. However, the final design combined Japanese characters with other symbols and artistic stylization to create the cascading effect.
Source of the rumor: CNET Interview
The rumor seemingly started circulating online in 2017, after CNET published an interview with Whiteley, a production designer at Animal Logic, who designed the green rain of digital code.
In an interview titled, "Creator of The Matrix code reveals its mysterious origins," he playfully claimed that he "likes to tell everybody" the code is "made out of Japanese sushi recipes." However, he did not provide further specifics, nor did he explicitly state that the green code consisted solely of sushi recipes (emphasis added):
"I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," says Whiteley, a production designer from England who's now based at the Animal Logic animation and visual-effects studio in Sydney. He scanned the characters from his wife's Japanese cookbooks. "Without that code, there is no Matrix."
We have reached out to Whiteley for a comment and will update this report if/when we receive a response.
More details on how Whiteley created the code
Whiteley reiterated the culinary-inspired origin of the Matrix code in a 2019 interview titled, "Secrets of 'The Matrix' code," for "befores & afters," an online "podcast and print publication dedicated to VFX, animation, CG, games and virtual production run by longtime industry journalist Ian Failes." The article provided a deeper look into the creation of the green code and its design process.
Whiteley explained he used katakana, one of two sets of syllabic Japanese script, to create the design, because of its "very nice simple strokes." Notably, he cited both cookbooks and his children's alphabet sheets as sources of inspiration. To refine the appearance, he integrated Arabic numerals and modified the font to resemble the green text on old computer monitors (emphasis added):
"My wife is an amazing cook and we've just got tonnes of cookbooks and cooking magazines at home. So I started looking through the cookbooks, and also these alphabet books my kids had from Japanese school, and I ended up hand-drawing all of the graphics using the alphabet sheets and the cookbooks."
The green hue was incorporated in order to match the look of text on an old IBM CRT monitor. Then, looking to mix up the font, Whiteley combined these designs with Arabic numerals.
Whiteley also flipped the numbers and graphics back to front, creating the illusion of viewing the code from the inside out. To achieve the distinctive, imperfect look of the Matrix code, Whiteley hand-drew each element before digitizing them:
This had the effect of clipping some of the tops and bottoms of the characters, which were further 'messed with' by adding in line strokes and dots and graphic icons. "If you look at closely at the code," says Whiteley, "you'll find that it's not clean pieces of type. There's a lot of little artefacts and rubbish that comes with it. I really liked that."
Additionally, Whiteley explained the cascading effect of the Matrix code didn't originally flow downward.
"To be at the beginning of all that back then, and just messing around with some type from a Japanese cookbook, it's just ridiculous where it went from there," Whiteley told "befores & afters." "But movies aren't made by single people. They're made by massive crews and everyone had input into it," he highlighted. Whiteley also added that his Japanese friends love the idea that the code came from Japanese cookbooks: "They'd be looking into the code to see whether they could see sushi falling down the screen or menus or cooking recipes, which is hilarious."
However, as Wired reported, Japanese speakers wouldn't be able to extract a full recipe from the film, as the digital rain is written in code. Additionally, Whiteley pointed out that sushi recipes are typically written in hiragana and kanji, Japan's syllabic and logographic writing systems, whereas "The Matrix" code is stylized in syllabic characters primarily used for foreign words.
When asked if a specific book inspired the code, he told Wired, "I've been kind of not wanting to tell anyone what the recipe book is, partly because that's the last bit of magic."
We have investigated other rumors regarding "The Matrix," including a claim that in the film Neo's passport expired on Sept. 11, 2001.
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