How they do this I don't know but it sure is impressive. One of the coolest scenes from The Matrix animated in ASCII art.
You might need a decent sized monitor for this to look ok, but do try it
URL: http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~renacer/ascii-matrix.html.gz?D0=1
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The basic animation is with javascript, amazingly the file is a bunch of sequential frames that display one after another. There are applications that will ascii-ize images, from the days when people would print images on line printers, but haven't looked into finding one.
They use Aalib and aview