[WARNING: spoilers.]
"Love, Death, & Robots" is a Netflix animated anthology series that has gone on for four seasons and shows no sign of stopping. Season 1 came out in March 2019; Seasons 2-4 came out in May of 2021, 2022, and 2025 respectively. Being an anthology series means that every episode is a fairly short animation, from about six to twenty minutes, each story done by a different animation house, resulting in a mishmash of themes and styles and genres and tropes, some of which may be tenuously connected and/or repeated (e.g., the theme of people contending with predatory monsters that come out of the dark, a nightmare forever bubbling out of the mire of the Jungian collective unconscious). Many of the stories proved of little interest to me; some were politically repugnant, but over the course of four seasons, a few stories caught my attention and elicited loud laughter or deep fascination. I'm trying to remember whether any of the stories touched me deeply; I don't think any of them did. Some stories were, unfortunately, outright annoying, and quite a few featured tropes I had already seen in full-length films of the sci-fi, action, horror, and comedy genres. Season 1, with its eighteen episodes, is by far the longest season. The following seasons are all short by comparison. Season 2 has eight episodes; Season 3 has nine episodes; Season 4 has ten episodes. Maybe Season 5 will come full circle and have eighteen episodes again. The series refers to seasons as volumes. Here's a list of episodes with summaries and insights.
Volume 1
 |
| "The Secret War" |
2. "Beyond the Aquila Rift": A space traveler discovers he's in a sci-fi/horror Plato's Cave. Part "Matrix," part Lovecraftian horror, this animation was mostly an excuse for a French animation team to portray yet more sex on screen. At the very end, when we see the true horror of the main character's actual situation... yeah, I'd choose to remain plugged into the Matrix, too. "Realistic," video cut-scene animation.
3. "Ice Age": A young couple discovers an old fridge that's a rapidly evolving, miniature pocket universe. The power of this story comes from the suspense of how it's all going to end, which is why this fizzles. Stephen King used to write similar stories (I'm thinking of the reality-bending "Word Processor of the Gods" and the world-destroying "The End of the Whole Mess"), but this story ends on a disappointingly innocuous note, though it is curious that the pocket universe starts over again but gets a little crazy (humans and dinosaurs together?). Of note: this was a combination of live action and animation: Topher Grace and Mary Elizabeth Winstead play the young couple in their new apartment inside an ancient building. The pocket universe inside the fridge presents all sorts of problems in terms of story logic, and what I'd really hoped for was an ending in which the world of the fridge somehow escapes its limits and enters our world. But it never happens. Except for some sparkles.
4. "Sonnie's Edge": The owner of a gladiatorial creature turns out not to be the owner. I saw who the truly dangerous antagonist in the story was from a mile away, but otherwise, I thought the premise was interesting: the main character's consciousness was never in her human form but always inside the creature that goes into combat. Essentially, her "edge" is that she has to fight for her life every time she steps into the arena: if the combat creature dies, she dies with it. Fear is her motivator. "Realistic," video cut-scene animation.
5. "When the Yogurt Took Over": Sentient yogurt gives humanity solutions; humanity fucks up. Amusing, but another preachy bit of nothing. The yogurt solves all of humanity's financial crises and tells humanity to follow its step-by-step plan without deviation to achieve peace and prosperity, but of course human arrogance means humanity fucks the whole thing up. Come to think of it, the story might actually have a welcome, inadvertently anti-utopian subtext. Hm. I might have to think about this one more deeply. The story was originally written by John Scalzi, who wrote Old Man's War. Cartoonish, Pixar-style animation.
6. "The Secret War": Russian soldiers in WW2 Siberia fight a humongous nest of ghouls. This might be my favorite episode of Volume 1. The ghouls are flat characters, so their only value to the drama lies in how viciously they kill the humans. The real drama is in how the humans interact with each other. "Realistic," video cut-scene animation, darkly lit.
7. "Sucker of Souls": An archaeologist and a paramilitary team discover Dracula. Chaos ensues. What if Dracula were a huge, brutish, animalistic nightmare? Funny: the first member of the group to die is the young, Korean assistant. And this won't be the last story in which cats are called upon to combat spiritual terrors. Full-on cartoon animation.
8. "The Witness": A stripper/exotic dancer sees a murder and realizes she and the killer are replaying stories. Wikipedia summarizes this story by suggesting that the woman and the murderer are caught in a time loop, but if that were the case, the story's details would play out more exactly. In the beginning, the woman witnesses the murder. At the end, the woman is the murderer. If this is a time/causality loop, it's a loop with two (or maybe more) distinct components. And this is another animated excuse for gratuitous nudity—thrusting hips, luxuriant pubic hair, and pointy nipples. Frankly, I don't find animated sexuality sexy, precisely because it's animated. Combined animation and performance capture.
9. "Suits": Farmers with mechas defend their farms from marauding alien life. This was a story with heart as neighbor farmers come clanking together in their heavy mechas to protect each other from aliens that remind me of the things that broke through the forcefields protecting Wakanda in "Avengers: Infinity War." I did have to wonder, though, why the farmers had thought it was worthwhile to colonize such a planet: when we do a pullback at the end, we see the planet is positively swarming with these creatures; the farmers are fighting a losing battle. What does this say about human stubbornness and stupidity? If anything, the planet's hostile alien life reminded me a bit of Robert Silverberg's Face of the Waters, a story of humans marooned on the ocean planet Hydros, where every life form wants to kill the invaders because, as it turns out, the life forms are all part of a hive consciousness reacting like an immune system to an infection. The humans, once they realize this, begin to accept the idea of joining with the hive mind as a way to survive until only the main character is left. And does he, too, knuckle under eventually and get assimilated? Or does he stand firm until he's rescued? Well, in this short at least, there's no hope of a comfortable, benign absorption. Animation in a "stop-motion painting" style.
10. "Good Hunting": A Chinese father and son battle fox-spirits in an age of colonization and the rise of tech that is banishing magic from the world. One of several Chinese-themed stories in an era in which China wants to see itself portrayed positively in Western cinema. Like "Dragonslayer" and "Apocalypto," "Good Hunting" is about the end of an era as British colonialism brings in new cultures and new technologies that, through their secularism, banish Chinese magic and spirituality. The main character, a boy who starts off as a fox-spirit hunter but who has compassion on the creatures, ends up befriending the last of the fox-spirits as she turns increasingly human through the leeching-away of magic. When her cruel English master replaces her legs with mechanical ones because he has a robot fetish, she finds her Chinese friend, who's gotten good at robotics, and who makes her a mechanically transformable human/fox body, complete with weaponry, so she can wreak revenge on all the rapacious Englishmen taking advantage of young Chinese ladies. So the title "Good Hunting" starts off having one meaning before gaining another. That said, the story wasn't the most compelling of the bunch. Animation reminiscent of "Blue Eye Samurai," but more 2D.
11. "The Dump": An ornery old farmer won't quit his property because he lives in symbiosis with a hulking garbage creature. I could see where this story was going the moment I saw the bored city inspector sit down to interview the ornery farmer, completely uninterested in his sob stories. This was two Hollywood stereotypes playing against each other: the weird, fetishy hick and the absolute bore of a bureaucrat. My only interest was in what form "Otto" the trash monster would take. When we finally see him, he's a bit reminiscent of the inhuman creature at the end of "The Substance." Cartoonish, vaguely Pixar-style animation, but with old guys' dicks flopping flaccidly around.
12. "Shape-shifters": Two Special Forces soldiers are werewolves who discover Taliban werewolves. At sixteen minutes, I guess you can't expect too much from a story, but I think "Shape-shifters" should've tried harder. Is there a werewolf mythology in Afghanistan? Could this have more deeply stressed the tension between loyalty to one's kind and loyalty to one's country? Otherwise, this felt like a pretty typical werewolf tale. "Realistic" animation.
13. "Fish Night": If human ghosts haunt cemeteries, what if animal ghosts from ancient times haunted now-arid seabeds? I think the premise of that question is spookier than the actual story, which is a fluorescent version of the "Night on Bald Mountain" number in Disney's "Fantasia." A pair of traveling salesmen stop in the middle of the southwestern desert when their car breaks down. The old salesman asks the eerie question about ancient ghosts... and the night comes alive with the sea creatures that used to inhabit the area when it was a deep ocean, millions of years earlier. The younger businessman, caught up in the magic, throws off his clothes, floats into the sky, and swims joyfully with the creatures... until a ghostly megalodon comes along and tears him to shreds. Not the most imaginative of stories, but this one at least had promise. Old, Disney-style cartoon animation with CGI elements.
14. "Helping Hand": If Andy Weir had massive balls, he'd write this astronaut-gets-back-to-safety story. A female astronaut, out on a repair mission while her male partner communicates with her from Earth, gets hit by space debris and starts losing oxygen after she's knocked off the satellite she'd been repairing. Using momentum, she throws a piece of equipment to push her back to the satellite, but she just misses a handgrip and floats the other way. Desperate, and with little oxygen left, she tightens a strap around her forearm, takes off her spacesuit's sleeve, lets her arm freeze into a block of ice, breaks it off, then throws her arm in such a way as to push her back to her own ship, all thought of repairs now gone. She manages to get back inside her ship, and her earthbound partner radioes, asking whether she needs a helping hand. That was a painfully dumb but well-earned punchline. "Realistic" animation, maybe with performance capture.
15. "Alternate Histories": An interactive, pick-your-own-adventure program explores alternate histories after Hitler is killed in various ways. This was easily the stupidest, laziest animation of the bunch, done in the style of those Kurzgesagt videos (here for example). I'm not saying I hate the Kurzgesagt style, but in an anthology series where other animation teams are doing a lot of hard work in terms of animation, voice acting, and overall direction, this kind of video—meant to mimic some sort of interactive app—just looks cheap. What's more, the scenarios in which Hitler dies all start out the same way, which makes no sense at all for a serious exploration of alternate histories: instead of six scenarios in which young Hitler is always walking out of a school building, why not kill Hitler as an infant, or as a toddler, or as a pre-teen? Why not kill him in his twenties? The scenario questions just kept piling up in my brain, and I couldn't enjoy this story (well, "story") at all.
16. "Lucky 13": An unlucky troop transport gets a new pilot and a new shot at being lucky. While this one looked disappointingly like a long cut scene from one of the later versions of Halo, I thoroughly enjoyed the story of a young, female pilot nicknamed Cutter who bonds with her hunk-o'-junk troop transport—something of a hazing ritual for rookie pilots, who have to fly the crappiest aircraft first before they can graduate to better ships. Cutter flies nineteen missions without losing a single soldier (the ship had been unlucky, before that, for losing so many soldiers), and the transport—numbered 13-02313 (all the digits also add up to 13)—gets re-nicknamed "Lucky 13." Cutter starts to think of the ship as having a mind and will of its own, and when she's finally forced to self-destruct 13 after a crash landing, the blast doesn't go off until all of her troops are safe behind cover, and all the enemy have swarmed the craft. Only then does 13 blow up, despite its timer. The story is a great metaphor for a pilot's love of his or her ship, the sadness of its loss, and the continuation of the ship's spirit as the fight goes on. I liked this story a lot. Video-game-level "realistic" animation.
17. "Blindspot": A cyborg rookie joins a cyborg gang on a heist that their coordinator didn't prepare them for. This was mostly just eye candy. The story did a not-bad job of establishing characterization right away, but the story itself was, otherwise, a pretty typical heist-gone-wrong scenario, with an incredibly incompetent leader coordinating the heist but somehow unable to provide the crew with crucial information about their target's defensive capabilities. That level of incompetence and stupidity felt false to me, so I couldn't deeply connect to this story at all. Conventional cartoon animation.
18. "Zima Blue": A mysterious artist finally explains his origins and finds his true purpose. One of those "the ultimate truth involves coming full circle" stories, "Zima Blue" toys with the idea of sentient AI becoming massively contemplative, then realizing that the greatest pleasures in life are the simplest, and those pleasures involve the fulfilling of one's original purpose. For you see, Zima Blue isn't a cyborg, i.e., a human who becomes less human over time as he endures enhancement after enhancement: no, Zima Blue started life as a mere pool-cleaning robot whose only purpose was to clean the muck out of a swimming pool covered in blue tiles that the store had labeled as the color Zima Blue. After becoming more intelligent, then sentient, over time through add-ons; after creating planet-sized works of art, Zima Blue, who finally talks to interviewer Claire Markham, begins to realize he wants to go back to his roots, to go back to pool-cleaning. This could've been a much better story had it been written by smarter people. Here's a little secret: science-fiction or fantasy stories whose conclusion is that The truth has been staring you in the face this entire time might make for a decent Zen lesson ("follow your original nature"), but as stories go, they merely reflect the intellectual limits of the storyteller, and the smartest story characters can never be smarter than their storytellers. I'd rather have a story that reveals a universe-shattering truth expressed in ineffable images than a story about a come-full-circle truth that feels just like all the other come-full-circle truths out there. This is why I'm still blown away by the series finale for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which forced Jean-Luc Picard to think cross-temporally in an inexpressible way that no humans had ever done—truly going where no one had gone before, the very essence of Trek. "Zima Blue" is animated in an aggressively Art Deco style; its characters have ridiculously short torsos and long, long legs.
Favorite from Volume 1: probably "The Secret War," which is mostly about courage, brotherhood, and sacrifice—with or without its monsters. Well done in terms of scripting and visuals, it's a war story with ghouls in it, as if war weren't horrible enough. Never thought I'd find myself sympathizing with Soviets, though.
Runner-up: without a doubt, "Lucky 13," which almost took the top spot for me. This is a really good war story.
Volume 2
 |
| "All Through the House" |
2. "Ice": Two ethnically Asian brothers on a distant planet want to watch alien whales breaching. Most inhabitants of this planet are "modded," i.e., modified, to be physically superior–stronger, more agile, more flexible, and better able to survive the planet's harsh, icy climate. Younger brother Sedgewick refuses to get modded and doesn't like this world his family moved to; older brother Fletcher is fully modded but sympathizes with his sullen younger brother, who wants to see the planet's dominant life form: "frost whales," which like to break through the ice in order to breathe, usually breaching as they do so, thus making it dangerous to stand too close. Fletcher persuades his equally modded friends to let Sedgewick come with them to watch a frost whale, but they stand too close; Fletcher gets injured, prompting the normally sullen Sedgewick to grab his brother and carry him off the cracking ice. It turns out Fletcher had faked his injury to get his little brother spiritually off his ass, and the trick worked: Sedgewick now feels more at home, and Fletcher's friends accept him, no longer calling him an "extro" for being unmodded. I'm tempted to say I didn't like this story (also done in a somewhat Deco style—what is it with ethnicity and Deco?), but there was something I could connect to thanks to the "wise older brother" angle. I personally have never been that wise, and I'm sure my younger brothers can tell you stories of how I'd been a stupid dick to them on multiple occasions. So maybe what I liked about Fletcher is how he represented the big brother I could have been.
3. "Pop Squad": What happens when you're a child-killing population-control officer who gets soft when he finally interacts with a child instead of shooting it? This animation was a futuristic noir story about a trenchcoated officer who is tasked with killing children: in this world, childbirth is highly regulated; any kids found born naturally, outside the purview of the government, get terminated. There's a surprisingly conservative, not-well-hidden antigovernment (and anti-abortion?) subtext to this story, but in the end, government wins. The ambiance is bleak and rainy and "Blade Runner"-y (as many of these future-dystopia animations are); the story is dark and ultimately sad. The pop in the title can be taken to mean "population" (as in population control) or "pop 'im in the skull."
4. "Snow in the Desert": A genetically different albino with a Wolverine-like healing factor has self-exiled on a harsh desert world where he is wanted and found by two very different parties. The albino himself is named Snow, so ha ha, I guess: Snow in the desert, forsooth. Snow's rapid-healing powers are the second time I've seen a callback to Wolverine: the first time was in "Sonnie's Edge," when Sonnie's human golem is killed by the cute assistant who is the true enemy in that short: she's armed with Wolverine claws that spring out of her forearm with terrible force and stab Sonnie's golem through the bottom of the jaw and out through the top of her skull. The bounty hunters after Snow are tasked with bringing back his balls, where the hunters' contractor thinks the most genetic potency—and the secret to immortality—lies. Snow is centuries old, having long outlived his wife, who killed herself when she grew too old while Snow remained young. The other party seeking Snow is Hirald, an Earth Central Intelligence agent who has her own secret: she too cannot age because she's a cyborg, and while she wants to bring Snow back—noncoercively—to Earth, she feels a pull toward him because they have agelessness in common. This short ended up being better than I expected, sort of a gritty, futuristic take on the old story of the hunt for the Fountain of Youth (now in Snow's snowballs), and I liked the slightly off-kilter romantic angle. Performance-capture animation with great landscaping, but a pretty typical, rocky alien world.
5. "The Tall Grass": The train always stops in this same spot at night. Don't step off the tracks and venture into the tall grass. This is a horror story that is ultimately harmless, but it frustratingly follows all of the horror-movie tropes to get our protag into trouble: he's standing on the ground by the stalled train, looking out through the tall grass; he sees mysterious patches of glowing light and feels compelled to leave the safety of the train to go exploring, unmindful of whether the grass around him might turn into a maze that traps him. He sees what may be humanoid movement out of the corner of his eye; I was reminded of "Signs." Then come the hungry zombies/demons/whatevertheyare. Their scariest feature—since their faces are featureless—are their fanged mouths, which open hungrily like bubbles popping in super-slow motion. Decent animation that seems to be a combination of stop-motion and 3D work. Stupid protagonist, though, which is why I hate most horror stories.
6. "All Through the House": What exactly is Santa Claus? I admit I accidentally ruined this one for myself when I saw the short on YouTube a couple years ago, not knowing it was part of this anthology. Despite having seen it once already, I still busted a gut while watching it again. Two kids are unable to sleep on Christmas Eve when they hear what they think is Santa puttering around downstairs. Big sis Leah wakes up little brother Billy, and they steal quietly downstairs and hide behind furniture. They see what at first looks like Santa's jolly shadow, then a horrible, writhing tongue-tentacle shoots out and slurps up the entire cup of milk and lassos the plate of cookies. When the kids hear the cookies crunching, they see that "Santa's" shadow isn't of Santa at all, but of some horrific creature with a bloated scrotum-throat, spidery legs, tyrannosaur fangs, and gigantic jaws. And then the thing reveals itself, in all its nightmarish glory, and makes straight for the cowering kids who have seen its true form. I won't spoil the rest for now, but what happens next had me howling. This was easily the funniest of all the shorts in Volume 2, and part of me kind of hopes that this really is what Santa Claus is like. And just like Leah, I have to ask, What would have happened if I hadn't been good? Animation is pure stop-motion and very well done. One amusing point: the kids speak with British accents, but on TV in the living room is an American program.
7. "Life Hutch": A healing/repair AI robot turns murderous. Another ho-hum AI-gone-wild scenario, but with Michael B. Jordan's fine acting, it works way better than it should. In something of a compacted Star Wars scenario, pilot Terence (Jordan) crash lands on a planetoid after his ship is damaged in combat. He finds a previously crash-landed "life hutch" (shelter/first-aid module) and ducks inside, where he is met by a damaged AI robot that starts attacking him. Terence soon realizes the robot's motion trackers are shot, so he freezes. As the large, heavy robot searches for him, its tracks roll over his right hand, painfully crushing fingers while Terence tries to stifle a scream. Eventually, Terence manages to get the better of the robot, and a computerized warning blurts out, far too late, that the AI robot appears to have sustained damage, to which Terence replies with a completely predictable "No shit"—the punchline of the story. Entertaining if not too original. Animation is realistic to the point of looking almost like live action. Michael B. Jordan definitely elevates what would have otherwise been yet another boringly typical story.
8. "The Drowned Giant": A naked giant washes up on an English shore. Do we get to see his dick before it rots off? The voice of a British scientist narrates the discovery of a body that has washed ashore next to a seaside British town. What makes the body remarkable is that it's of a giant, essentially a human writ large and, as the scientist notes, not brutish-looking at all (he bares a resemblance to actor Harry Melling, a.k.a. Dudley Dursley, who lost a ton of weight over the years, but I'm not sure any human actually played the giant, who simply lies there), but instead looking sadly noble and dignified despite being naked. I was vaguely reminded of James Morrow's Towing Jehovah, a novel about what to do with God's immense corpse, found floating in the ocean and needing to be towed to the Arctic Circle to be preserved. The giant in the animated story initially evokes awe among the people who see it, but they become brave enough to walk on it, then eventually to spray-paint graffiti all over it, then to start taking it apart piece by piece as it slowly rots (not enough mention is made of the stink, the bloating, and the flies that would surround such a corpse; I've walked by swollen, gassy deer carcasses that smelled awful). Pieces of the giant are soon to be found all over the English countryside—a skull here, a femur there. Even the enormous penis is given a place of honor at a carnival freak show, where it's falsely labeled as a whale penis. The story can be seen as a meditation on the passage of time, on the loss of awe in the face of death as the death itself recedes into the past, and on how something considered almost sacred is soon reduced to triviality. Perhaps there's a Buddhist lesson about impermanence in all that. This was a quietly meditative piece, a thoughtful way to end Volume 2, and overall not a bad story.
Favorite from Volume 2: The clear winner here is "All Through the House." Oh, my God, yes. I'd have to watch it twenty times before I stopped laughing at the humor. And artistically speaking, it's so well done: the dripping, mucus-y saliva, the slavering fangs, the monster's raspy voice, its flicking tongue, and the kids' absolute terror. I love this one so much. It's probably my favorite of all four seasons. Can it ever be outdone?
Runner-up: "Snow in the Desert" barely beats out "The Drowned Giant." "Snow" is weird and quirky and action-y, suiting my tastes. "Giant" is also good given its thoughtfulness, but the meditation on life is a little obvious and on-the-nose.
Volume 3
 |
| "Swarm" |
2. "Bad Traveling": A giant thanapod ("death on feet" or "death-feet") is eating a ship's crew one by one, but the crew are also doing each other in because people are assholes. This one, about sea vessels, also reminded me of a Robert Silverberg scenario, and like the previous story, its commentary on the ouroboros-like, self-consuming, violent nature of human character and the expensive cost of finally wising up to avert disaster is appropriately gloomy. That said, this is a better, more interesting story than the previous one, and it ends on a note of grim victory, but with no promises for the future. Dark, realistic animation.
3. "The Very Pulse of the Machine": What if Io, a moon of Jupiter, were in fact a huge, sentient machine? Questions of who built the machine are set aside in this story of one astronaut's struggle to survive a crash landing and to learn the truth. In the end, the story hints at greater alien mysteries, but it never offers more than the faintest of tastes, making the story's deeper themes shallower than they should have been. Cartoonish, increasingly surreal animation, but what felt like a lot of unfulfilled potential.
4. "Night of the Mini Dead": A zombie apocalypse begins with inadvisable sex in a cemetery. This hilarious animation, done with miniatures (CGI models? real, physical miniatures?), looks almost like a sort of sped-up, stop-motion story, but it's hard to tell. Like the two previous stories, though, this story is a fable about how human stupidity (illicit sex in a cemetery) and vanity can have an escalating snowball effect leading to everyone's destruction. I laughed out loud at several points, but the more I think about the accumulated didacticism of these first four stories, the less I'm liking Volume 3 overall.
5. "Kill Team Kill": What's a fire team to do when it faces up against a cyborg bear? Even this story doesn't escape the moralistic finger-wagging. A military team fights for survival against a gigantic, cybernetically enhanced bear created by the CIA. Americans fight a losing battle against an American creation. Cartoon-style animation.
6. "Swarm": Humans encounter an ancient hive mind. A male scientist visits a female researcher who has been living and interacting with a hive-mind intelligence. The male scientist wants to harness this "swarm's" ability to produce order from chaos as a way to make humanity's own survival in the galaxy more robust. The female scientist objects, seeing this as the enslavement of a biological life form, but the man reminds her that these beings are not inherently sentient even if they have absorbed the genetic traits and memories of other alien species over the untold millions of years of their existence. The woman reluctantly agrees to help with the project, and the two fall passionately in lust as they work together. But the swarm, having existed a long time, has evolved genetic protocols that warn it of danger. It takes over the woman, making her a living, intelligent speaker for the hive mind, which does seem to possess a certain level of sentience. She/it warns the male scientist that the swarm is aware of his intentions and has faced races like humanity in the past, then she/it offers the man a terrible choice that will likely decide humanity's fate over the coming centuries. While this story, too, criticizes humanity's collectively stupid and self-destructive decisions, the story offers us the choice of siding with human individuals or with the relentless, genetically coercive hive mind of the swarm. The story is too big in scope to come to any neat conclusions, but I appreciated the quality of the detailed animation, the voice work, and the depth of the story itself, which was well written and not insulting to the viewer's intelligence. The visual of the poor female scientist's integration into the hive mind is almost painful to look at, a horrible combination of hentai tentacle porn and literal skull-rape. I had a wild thought that this hive mind had something in common with the brain bugs in the movie version of "Starship Troopers," which suck out human brains and gain access to human thought patterns just by ingesting our engram-imprinted flesh. This story and "Night of the Mini Dead" are, thus far, my two favorites of this season/volume. But every story this season has been preachy. Video game cut-scene animation.
7. "Mason's Rats": A Scotsman is having trouble with an infestation of superintelligent rats. No explanation is given for how or why the rats have become so intelligent and organized, and part of the humor comes from the fact that these super-rats have invaded the farm of a dour Scotsman who receives technological help from a blithe, blasé Englishman (is this a commentary on how the UK government relates to individual countries within the UK?) who helps the farmer order a pest-control device in the form of a mean-looking, armored scorpion armed with scissor-claws, a laser gatling gun, and other assorted weaponry. The device successfully eliminates a literal pile of rats, but as the farmer watches how the rats communicate, self-organize, and bravely fight this new monster, he begins to side with the rats and eventually does in the machine himself with a well-aimed blast from his shotgun. From that point on, Mason and the rats, their courage now proven, live in peace. The story humorously refuses to answer a whole host of How? and Why? questions, but by the end, I just didn't care. While neither as funny as "Mini Dead" nor as eerily profound as "Swarm," this story nevertheless had a jolly share of gore and humor, plus a sudden, happy twist at the end. Artfully done 3D animation and the possibility of peace between men and rats.
8. "In Vaulted Halls Entombed": Soldiers discover an ancient, chthonian evil chained beneath a mountain. Well, damn, things have apparently started to look up during these final few episodes of Volume 3. Another military story in which hardened soldiers—US Marine Special Forces—prove to be no match for ancient evil, I'm pretty sure this short was originally meant to have some kind of Cthulhu punchline. In Lovecraft's mythos, Cthulhu is an elder god the very sight of whom is supposed to drive human beings mad. Given how the "final girl," a female soldier, reacts to the sight of the monstrosity chained inside the guts of a mountain, I'm guessing that this monstrosity is supposed to be Cthulhu. The major evidence that this is not Lovecraft's Cthulhu, however, is that this titanic being isn't deep underwater in the Pacific, in the city of R'lyeh. While the story is mostly conventional, I like how it ended. "Realistic" video game cut-scene animation, with the recognizable voices and faces of Joe Mangianello, Jai Courtney, and Christian Serratos ("The Walking Dead").
9. "Jibaro": In an age of knights in armor, one deaf knight will have a fateful encounter with a dancing, chaotic river spirit. I'm not sure whether to write a lot or a little about this very disappointing ending to Volume 3. Animated with performance-capture technology for the protagonist and unrealistically esoteric armor styles, the story follows a group of treasure-plundering, conquistador-like knights on horseback who have a fateful encounter with a wild, gold-coin-flinging river spirit whose siren screech drives men into a killing frenzy, after which they run to the river and drown themselves. When the river spirit emits her piercing cry, our protagonist, a deaf knight, can't hear her, but he sees how she's affecting his companions. The spirit, constantly writhing, dancing, and flinging her limbs, finally settles down and cuddles with the knight, the only survivor of her song/wail, as he sleeps. When he wakes up, things do not end well. I could look at the story as one of organized religion and Western civilization versus the atavistic forces of untamed sylvan primitivity, but there was something supremely annoying about the river spirit, whose constant movement reminded me strongly of a kid who's heavily afflicted with ADHD and literally unable to hold still. I'm going to guess that the director probably decided the river spirit should be an incarnation of chaos and wildness, but I think he aid it on a little too thick. Lushly colored, realistic animation that is partly performance capture. I really didn't like this one despite its mythological overtones and a fundamental civilizational-cultural-ontological-spiritual conflict that should have excited the religious-studies portion of my brain but somehow failed to.
Favorites from Volume 3: probably "Night of the Mini Dead" and "Swarm." The first was simply hilarious despite its obvious "humanity is stupid and shortsighted" messaging; the second was deeply philosophical and viscerally unsettling in a body-horror kind of way. David Cronenberg would be proud.
Runner-up: It's either "Bad Traveling," which is well scripted, or "In Vaulted Halls Entombed," which has a great ending.
Volume 4
 |
| "Close Encounters of the Mini Kind" |
2. "Spider Rose": A lonely, bereaved cyborg woman on a distant space fortress acquires a new pet. I think this was made by the same team who made "Swarm" (Blur Studio, USA); it's the same "realistic" animation style, and what is ultimately a bleakly poignant story of a woman who has lost her husband and her hope to pirates, but who acquires a strange pet from a race she has bargained with. This pet is genetically malleable, acquiring the traits of whoever owns it. Over time, it becomes more like an Earth creature, and our protagonist begins to feel more alive as she bonds with it more closely. Still, the day comes when the pirates who killed her husband attack again; she's able to defeat them one more time, but at the cost of all of her food and most of her oxygen. She thanks her pet for making her feel alive again, then gives it permission to eat her so it can survive and be taken back by the business-partner race she had bargained with at the beginning. I liked this story, which says something about one's attitudes toward life and death, and about the acceptance of death when one's fate is inevitable. Beautifully visualized and realized—stark, dark, and remote yet intimate.
3. "How Zeke Got Religion": The best cure for atheism is a close encounter with an actual demon. This cartoon-style animation is a World War II story about a bomber crew, one member of whom is an atheist who doesn't believe in "fairy tales." A cross-Channel bombing run on a French church goes wrong, and the demonic power being summoned inside the church leaps into the sky and attacks the bomber, giving the atheist a taste of realities and powers he can't possibly understand. I could see the story's punchline coming long before it arrived, which made the story less exciting than it could have been. Interestingly, William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist (arguably better than the story's movie version) ends in roughly the same way: Father Karras, who had lost his faith, regains it in his last moments because he now knows the Devil exists, and if there's a Devil, there must be a God.
4. "The Other Large Thing": Cats really do want to take over the world. With help from AI. A boilerplate expansion on the idea (yawn) that all cats really do seek world domination. Again with Chris Parnell as the cat. Pixar-ish animation. This is for people who really, really love cats. I'm no cat-hater, but I don't like cats as much as I love dogs.
5. "400 Boys": A gang in a devastated city seeks out other gangs to rid the city of its giant, baby-like attackers. Once again, Deco-style imagery to depict an ethnically diverse gang of youngsters all speaking in working-class English accents. The Earth's attackers look like humorously giant babies that wreck buildings in the manner of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in "Ghostbusters." The babies are also surprisingly easy to wound and to topple; Earth should have had less of a problem finishing these invaders off. It shouldn't have been up to a bunch of random gangs to defends us all from giant space babies. At a guess, the basic theme is one we've heard before: groups putting aside their differences and conflicts to work together in a time of crisis, i.e., a situation in which humanity starts making the right choices, and an affirmation that hope springs eternal. To that extent, this short is a refreshing departure from all of the let's-judge-humanity scolding we had to endure through so much of Volume 3.
6. "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur": In a deadly race for the amusement of the rich elites, one slave-warrior gets an idea. Ah, China! How you yearn for global approval! A nearly naked Chinese protagonist, Mei, a slave of some sort, puts her martial and athletic prowess on display in a deadly race with with other nearly naked, athletic competitors as well as with... dinosaurs! With MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) in the role of the smarmy, toothy emcee, the race takes place on a giant ring floating in space near the Jovian moons for the entertainment of the rich elites. At first, the humans race ahead of a bunch of triceratopses; as the dinosaurs begin to pass the humans, the humans figure clever ways to mount the beasts, which then become the humans' destriers. The humans then do their best to knock each other off their mounts and, well, if people die, then they die. We find out that Mei, with her in-vogue side-shaved hair and tatted head, is implied to be in a lesbian relationship with a lithe, nubile black competitor (sorry, China, but this is Netflix), but they still have to fight each other on the back of a triceratops. Mei knocks her lover off the triceratops and wins the race, leaving her paramour in the distance, but now, she must face a tyrannosaur that rises from a chamber underneath the sand and immediately eats the black girlfriend (thereby simultaneously appeasing China's distaste for lesbianism and satisfying the die-hard Western trope that the black person always dies in a science-fiction story). Mei sends her triceratops forward to fight the tyrannosaur; they mortally wound each other, but the triceratops dies first. Mei mounts the tyrannosaur, whom she sees as a slave like herself, and makes it up leap upward to catch the low-hanging observation deck of the elites, one or two of whom tumble over the edge to their deaths, and one of whom Mei kills on her own before she and the dinosaur fall back to the ring, both dying. Mei narrates her story in Chinese the whole time, and we see visions of a wolf pack running through a snowy forest—the wolves being a metaphor for the freedom and community that Mei craves, despite her knowing that all she can really do is choose to die on her own terms. This is a sad story that's rife with politically correct, Netflixy elements, but the story's power overshadows Netflix's attempt at PC nonsense. In the end, you don't really care how the main characters look or what their sexual preferences are; what grips you is the primal struggle—the conflict between competitors and the disparity between the slaves and the privileged. If Mei's final gesture was some sort of Marxist rebellion, then I hate to say it, but the power structure remains intact after Mei's death, so maybe the story is more about personal dignity in the face of an undignified, untenable situation. I came away from this half cynical about Netflix and half touched by the story.
7. "Golgotha": Aquatic aliens come to Earth to meet the resurrected messiah—a dolphin. Partly live action and partly CGI-animated, "Golgotha" is the story of a powerful alien race's visit to Earth after a life form on Earth dies and reportedly comes back to life. The aliens want to meet this messiah, who turns out to be a dolphin. A priest is sent by the Church to guide the alien delegate to the beach where the dolphin will appear; during the buildup to all this, everyone from the priest's monsignor to an American general is telling the priest not to fuck this up. When the alien arrives, a tentacled Lupo evolved to live in oceans, the priest meets it and the two have a brief discussion about faith. The alien, who apparently knows the dolphin's language, loudly summons the dolphin, whom the humans call Blackfin. Blackfin tells the Lupo delegate of humanity's long history of depredations against the cetaceans; a Lupo fleet appears above England and begins blasting while the priest moans, "We fucked up." This is another story in the spirit of trashing humanity for its many stupid decisions, with punishment coming in the form of alien justice in a humorously murderous variation of a similar story in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where the whales tell Spock of their displeasure about man's treatment of them. I do have to wonder about the title "Golgotha," though: it's the name of Jesus' crucifixion site, and is usually translated as "place of the skull." So is the entire earth Golgotha, then, about to be overrun with death? This is a humorous story starring Rhys Darby and the quintessentially Scottish Graham McTavish (the guy's a prodigious legend with the cast of the Hobbit movies, as they attest in several behind-the-scenes interviews). Alas, the story is too short to give us much of an idea what it is the aliens believe about faith, resurrection, God, or anything else. By the end, the one thing we know for sure is that they're immensely destructive, and they are, for lack of a better term, God's just punishment for humanity's many sins, avenging angels from across the stars, come to do the divine will. I liked this story, but it was, pardon the pun, preachy.
8. "For He Can Creep": A pet cat fights Satan to keep his poet owner from writing a poem that could destroy humanity. For once, this isn't a story about a cat wanting world domination. But the cat does think of his owner as "his poet." Satan appears and bids the poet write a poem in a scenario that anyone who's heard Tenacious D's "Tribute" knows: the poem will be the best, most sublime poem, and it will signal the downfall of humanity. The poet's cat enlists the aid of other cats to stop Satan—who frequently changes back and forth between human and malefic form—from getting his way. I found this to be a quaint story, but not overly compelling, mainly because the outcome seemed drearily predictable. 3D, CGI-enhanced, almost Disney-style cartoon animation.
9. "Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners": Smart appliances complain one after another about the stupidity and filth of humans and pets. This short had no plot: it was just interview after interview—a short series of even shorter shorts. One or two of the appliances were hilarious with their complaints, but the rest were sort of ho-hum. Not one of my favorites. Claymation-style animation. Decent voice work.
10. "Can't Stop": A music video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert. This is nothing more than an animated version of a music video, made to look like marionette versions of the Chili Peppers doing a live concert in front of a stadium crowd. What a dull way to end Volume 4. It was hard to tell whether these were at least partially real marionettes or fully animated figures made, through CGI, to look like marionettes on strings. Not that the mystery intrigues me; I thought this segment was dull and boring.
4. "The Other Large Thing": Cats really do want to take over the world. With help from AI. A boilerplate expansion on the idea (yawn) that all cats really do seek world domination. Again with Chris Parnell as the cat. Pixar-ish animation. This is for people who really, really love cats. I'm no cat-hater, but I don't like cats as much as I love dogs.
5. "400 Boys": A gang in a devastated city seeks out other gangs to rid the city of its giant, baby-like attackers. Once again, Deco-style imagery to depict an ethnically diverse gang of youngsters all speaking in working-class English accents. The Earth's attackers look like humorously giant babies that wreck buildings in the manner of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in "Ghostbusters." The babies are also surprisingly easy to wound and to topple; Earth should have had less of a problem finishing these invaders off. It shouldn't have been up to a bunch of random gangs to defends us all from giant space babies. At a guess, the basic theme is one we've heard before: groups putting aside their differences and conflicts to work together in a time of crisis, i.e., a situation in which humanity starts making the right choices, and an affirmation that hope springs eternal. To that extent, this short is a refreshing departure from all of the let's-judge-humanity scolding we had to endure through so much of Volume 3.
6. "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur": In a deadly race for the amusement of the rich elites, one slave-warrior gets an idea. Ah, China! How you yearn for global approval! A nearly naked Chinese protagonist, Mei, a slave of some sort, puts her martial and athletic prowess on display in a deadly race with with other nearly naked, athletic competitors as well as with... dinosaurs! With MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) in the role of the smarmy, toothy emcee, the race takes place on a giant ring floating in space near the Jovian moons for the entertainment of the rich elites. At first, the humans race ahead of a bunch of triceratopses; as the dinosaurs begin to pass the humans, the humans figure clever ways to mount the beasts, which then become the humans' destriers. The humans then do their best to knock each other off their mounts and, well, if people die, then they die. We find out that Mei, with her in-vogue side-shaved hair and tatted head, is implied to be in a lesbian relationship with a lithe, nubile black competitor (sorry, China, but this is Netflix), but they still have to fight each other on the back of a triceratops. Mei knocks her lover off the triceratops and wins the race, leaving her paramour in the distance, but now, she must face a tyrannosaur that rises from a chamber underneath the sand and immediately eats the black girlfriend (thereby simultaneously appeasing China's distaste for lesbianism and satisfying the die-hard Western trope that the black person always dies in a science-fiction story). Mei sends her triceratops forward to fight the tyrannosaur; they mortally wound each other, but the triceratops dies first. Mei mounts the tyrannosaur, whom she sees as a slave like herself, and makes it up leap upward to catch the low-hanging observation deck of the elites, one or two of whom tumble over the edge to their deaths, and one of whom Mei kills on her own before she and the dinosaur fall back to the ring, both dying. Mei narrates her story in Chinese the whole time, and we see visions of a wolf pack running through a snowy forest—the wolves being a metaphor for the freedom and community that Mei craves, despite her knowing that all she can really do is choose to die on her own terms. This is a sad story that's rife with politically correct, Netflixy elements, but the story's power overshadows Netflix's attempt at PC nonsense. In the end, you don't really care how the main characters look or what their sexual preferences are; what grips you is the primal struggle—the conflict between competitors and the disparity between the slaves and the privileged. If Mei's final gesture was some sort of Marxist rebellion, then I hate to say it, but the power structure remains intact after Mei's death, so maybe the story is more about personal dignity in the face of an undignified, untenable situation. I came away from this half cynical about Netflix and half touched by the story.
7. "Golgotha": Aquatic aliens come to Earth to meet the resurrected messiah—a dolphin. Partly live action and partly CGI-animated, "Golgotha" is the story of a powerful alien race's visit to Earth after a life form on Earth dies and reportedly comes back to life. The aliens want to meet this messiah, who turns out to be a dolphin. A priest is sent by the Church to guide the alien delegate to the beach where the dolphin will appear; during the buildup to all this, everyone from the priest's monsignor to an American general is telling the priest not to fuck this up. When the alien arrives, a tentacled Lupo evolved to live in oceans, the priest meets it and the two have a brief discussion about faith. The alien, who apparently knows the dolphin's language, loudly summons the dolphin, whom the humans call Blackfin. Blackfin tells the Lupo delegate of humanity's long history of depredations against the cetaceans; a Lupo fleet appears above England and begins blasting while the priest moans, "We fucked up." This is another story in the spirit of trashing humanity for its many stupid decisions, with punishment coming in the form of alien justice in a humorously murderous variation of a similar story in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where the whales tell Spock of their displeasure about man's treatment of them. I do have to wonder about the title "Golgotha," though: it's the name of Jesus' crucifixion site, and is usually translated as "place of the skull." So is the entire earth Golgotha, then, about to be overrun with death? This is a humorous story starring Rhys Darby and the quintessentially Scottish Graham McTavish (the guy's a prodigious legend with the cast of the Hobbit movies, as they attest in several behind-the-scenes interviews). Alas, the story is too short to give us much of an idea what it is the aliens believe about faith, resurrection, God, or anything else. By the end, the one thing we know for sure is that they're immensely destructive, and they are, for lack of a better term, God's just punishment for humanity's many sins, avenging angels from across the stars, come to do the divine will. I liked this story, but it was, pardon the pun, preachy.
8. "For He Can Creep": A pet cat fights Satan to keep his poet owner from writing a poem that could destroy humanity. For once, this isn't a story about a cat wanting world domination. But the cat does think of his owner as "his poet." Satan appears and bids the poet write a poem in a scenario that anyone who's heard Tenacious D's "Tribute" knows: the poem will be the best, most sublime poem, and it will signal the downfall of humanity. The poet's cat enlists the aid of other cats to stop Satan—who frequently changes back and forth between human and malefic form—from getting his way. I found this to be a quaint story, but not overly compelling, mainly because the outcome seemed drearily predictable. 3D, CGI-enhanced, almost Disney-style cartoon animation.
9. "Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners": Smart appliances complain one after another about the stupidity and filth of humans and pets. This short had no plot: it was just interview after interview—a short series of even shorter shorts. One or two of the appliances were hilarious with their complaints, but the rest were sort of ho-hum. Not one of my favorites. Claymation-style animation. Decent voice work.
10. "Can't Stop": A music video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert. This is nothing more than an animated version of a music video, made to look like marionette versions of the Chili Peppers doing a live concert in front of a stadium crowd. What a dull way to end Volume 4. It was hard to tell whether these were at least partially real marionettes or fully animated figures made, through CGI, to look like marionettes on strings. Not that the mystery intrigues me; I thought this segment was dull and boring.
Favorites from Volume 4: "Close Encounters of the Mini Kind," which made me bust a gut, and "Spider Rose," which was lonely, heartfelt, and starkly beautiful.
Runner-up: "Golgotha," despite the self-righteous tone of the comedy.
So the overarching (never let me hear you say the incorrect overarcing) theme of all four seasons seems to be a finger-wagging moral lesson about man's greed, stupidity, and hubris. It's also about his dissociation from, and disrespect for, nature, ultimately leading to humanity's self-destruction (possibly aided by cats). And this message is brought to you with no sense of irony by wielders of environment-destroying technology—people who are blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy, people who probably think of themselves as innocent parties nobly creating art for the masses even as they pass along their PC messaging of a racially and culturally mixed—and blandly homogenized—utopia.
Ugly political realities and on-the-nose messaging aside, I did enjoy many of episodes in the series, and I actually look forward to the fifth season/volume. The artistry in most of these shorts (except for the lazily done "Alternate Histories") is superb, often in spite of sagging and distasteful storylines. Visually, the entire anthology, taken as an evolving whole, is splendid to look at, and on that level, it's undoubtedly worth your time. But once you get into details and themes and political messaging, the question becomes complicated. So how worthwhile "Love, Death, & Robots" will be for you depends greatly on your tolerance for distasteful elements (which, frankly, might not be distasteful to you at all). Me, I found myself preferring the more personal, intimate, and deeply philosophical stories as opposed to the ones that were more obviously trying to rub their didacticism in my face. But even some of the more didactic episodes proved enjoyable to watch, and when balanced with the episodes that managed to coax hearty laughter out of me ("All Through the House," both "Mini" episodes, "Mason's Rats"), I'd say the overall experience of this series was worth my while. On the whole, "Love, Death, & Robots" gets a thumbs-up from me. My only advice would be not to worry too much about the PC messaging; you've heard it all before.
And watch out for all the flapping dicks.
No comments:
Post a Comment
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.