"The Meatrix" BREAKS ALL RECORDS OF ONLINE ADVOCACY FILMS WITH OVER 2 MILLION VISITORS
Hugely successful Flash™ movie against factory farming passes 2 million mark and goes international
New York (NY), December 2, 2003 – Less than a month after its launch, The Meatrix – the most successful Matrix spoof on the Internet – has been seen by over 2 million individuals worldwide, an unparalleled triumph for an online advocacy film.
The mix of humor, pop culture references, and an important message has clearly been resonating with a wide swath of the web using public. The Meatrix has been picked up by outlets ranging from USA Today, The Guardian (UK), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and NPR to MichaelMoore.com, Utne.com and AlterNet.org, and has been spreading like wildfire on hundreds of blogs, message boards and listserves.
As a result of this enormous international success, GRACE has launched Australian, Canadian and U.K. action pages, in collaboration with the Council of Canadians, U.K.-based FARM, and the Humane Society in Australia, while Spanish and Polish translations are in the works. Other international action pages are being considered. The Spanish translation, aimed at both the Hispanic-speaking population in the U.S. as well as Spain and countries in Central and South America, is scheduled to be launched mid-December.
Created by Free Range Graphics (www.freerangegraphics.com) for GRACE, the GRACE (www.gracelinks.org), The Meatrix is a humorous 3-minute Flash™ animation that highlights the problems of factory farming. Instead of Keanu Reaves, The Meatrix stars a young pig, Leo, who lives on a pleasant family farm ... he thinks. Leo is approached by a trenchcoat-clad cow, Moopheus, who shows him the ugly truth about agribusiness, complete with a send-up of the "stop-motion" camerawork immortalized by the Matrix. At the end of the movie, viewers are directed to an "action page" where they are encouraged to eat sustainable meat and support local family farmers.
Says Diane Hatz of GRACE: "We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from viewers worldwide, including from Canada, the U.K., Australia, Mexico, Poland, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Slovakia. They all loved The Meatrix so we decided to create action pages and, in some cases, translations in countries where organizations have contacted us, eager to offer local resources for sustainable food."
All international action pages and translations are or will be accessible from the main U.S. action page at the end of The Meatrix, www.themeatrix.com.
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