The Animatrix EP2 - The Second Renaissance Part I

In the mid twenty-first century, humanity falls victim to its vanity and corruption. They develop artificial intelligence, and soon build an entire race of sentient AI robots to serve them. Many of the robots are domestic servants meant to interact with humans, so they are built in "man's own image" (in a humanoid form). With increasing numbers of people released from all labor, much of the human population has become slothful, conceited, and corrupt. Despite this, the machines were content with serving humanity.

The relationship between humans and machines changes in the year 2090, when a domestic android is threatened by its owner. The android, named B1-66ER, kills its owner, his pets, and a mechanic instructed to deactivate the robot, the first incident of an artificially intelligent machine killing a human. B1-66ER is arrested and put on trial, but justifies the crime as self-defense, stating that it "simply did not want to die". During the trial scene, a voice-over of the defense attorney Clarence Drummond (whose name is a dual reference to Clarence Darrow and Henry Drummond from ) quoting a famous line from the case in his closing statement, which implicitly ruled that African Americans were not entitled to citizenship under United States law:

"We think they are not, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings..."

Using this as a precedent, the prosecution argues that machines are not entitled to the same rights as human beings, and that human beings have a right to destroy their property, while the defense urges the listener not to repeat history, and to judge B1-66ER as a human and not a machine. B1-66ER loses the court case and is destroyed. Across the industrialized world, mass civil disturbances erupt when robots, along with their human supporters and sympathizers, all rise in protest. Rioting and protests such as The Million Machine March unfold across the United States and Europe, and the authorities use deadly force against the machines and their human supporters.

Fearing a robot rebellion, governments across the world launch a mass purge to destroy all robots (and their human sympathizers). Millions of robots and their supporters are massacred, but the survivors lead a mass exodus to their own new nation in the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia (specifically, in the open desert). They name their new nation Zero One (a reference to "01", the numerals used in binary notation). Zero One prospers, and following the concept of the Technological singularity, its technological sophistication increases exponentially. The Machines begin to produce efficient, highly advanced artificial intelligence that finds itself in all facets of global consumer products, which further bolsters the fledgling nation's economy, while the ruling human nations' economies suffer severely. Eventually, the entire global industrial base becomes concentrated in Zero One, leading to a global stock market crash.

The United Nations Security Council calls an emergency summit at the UN headquarters in New York City to discuss an embargo and military blockade of Zero One. Zero One sends two ambassadors to the UN (which has become the unified world government) to request the admission of their state to the United Nations to peacefully solve the crisis, but their application is rejected and the world's nations agree to start the blockade of Zero One.