"The Witness," directed and written by artist Alberto Mielgo, is undoubtedly the most visually striking and inventive of the bunch - with its jittery composition and graphics-laden action, it plays like Into the Spider-Verse meets a Marilyn Manson music video, although it does contort itself into some questionable narrative knots to ensure its female protagonist is basically naked for most of the action. But there's something clinical about these pieces that may keep viewers at a distance - the most effective of the photo-real shorts is "Helping Hand," a claustrophobic chamber piece that cleverly ratchets up the tension to leave you squirming in your seat without ever outstaying its welcome. Miller and Fincher have said that they let the stories dictate the way each short was animated, and the CG shorts are definitely the most ambitious in terms of scale, with "The Secret War" featuring an army's desperate struggle against grotesque monsters in the Siberian forest, and "Sonnie's Edge" showcasing an elaborate gladiatorial monster fight. The rest utilize stylized CG, rotoscoping, 2D, or mixed media techniques, and for the most part, it's the more traditionally animated shorts that really pack a punch, perhaps because photo-real CGI is becoming so ubiquitous, especially in gaming.
Play Six of the shorts employ photo-real CG and motion capture work, which occasionally play like extended game cutscenes or trailer cinematics - but they're all aesthetically stunning, even if they can't quite make it across the uncanny valley. The shorts have no unified theme or message - some are dark and nihilistic, others poetic and hopeful, a few more that are surreal or openly comedic - but no two shorts look the same, utilizing animation teams and studios from around the world, including Hungary's Digic Pictures (which recently worked on the in-game cinematics on Destiny 2 and the trailer for Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege), France's Unit Image ( God of War, Beyond Good and Evil 2), Poland's Platige Image ( Metro Exodus, Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider), Korea's Reddog Culture House ( Overwatch, Voltron: Legendary Defender) and Miller's own LA-based Blur Studio ( Far Cry 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider), to name a few. The series' closest analogs are the likes of Heavy Metal, Liquid Television, and Adult Swim, but Love, Death & Robots takes things to another level in terms of style, scope, and its ability to shock.
#Love death and robots series#
Netflix's new anthology series - comprised of 18 animated shorts, varying between 5-17 minutes in length - is the epitome of cool an ambitious, dazzling, f***ed up fever-dream that hops between genres and animation styles to deliver an all-you-can-eat buffet of weirdness, from sentient yogurt to ghost fish to an alternate history that gleefully reimagines the many ways Hitler could've died.
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