Stars: 3.5/5
Do you really enjoy both animated boobs and space? Has your attention span been whittled away by Twitter? Are you a massive fan of robots? Netflix has your back.
The streaming platform’s newest venture into semi-nihilistic anthologies comes in the form of “Love, Death & Robots,” a nineteen-episode collection of animated shorts that earned every bit of their TV-MA rating.
They cover the issues that the title leads you to expect; worlds shaped by technological advancement, still feeling the very human wounds of war and violence in the face of awe-inspiring change.
Each episode is less than 20 minutes long, but for the most part, they succeed in telling a story. Some plots feel overworked, taking the full time to juice a storyline that could have been told in a sentence, like “The Dump.” A man’s trash pile comes alive and becomes his friend. The end.
Others, like “Beyond the Aquila Rift,” take something that should be a movie and strip it down to their most summarized, watered down forms, washing away any suspense that could have been developed with time.
Luckily, in a few shorts, Goldilocks found Baby Bear’s bed. “Suits,” a tale of a farming community’s defense against some seriously vengeful alien bugs, managed to feel whole without dragging. “Zima Blue,” the story of an artist with a unique backstory, also hit this mark, ending right when the plot was perfectly fleshed out.
As for the actual content, each episode felt original and individual, the result of a different team and animators working on each one. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy the plots of some of the episodes, but the curiosity of not knowing what was coming next kept me watching until I couldn’t stay awake. Some of those switches will give you whiplash.
Netflix is actually testing out something new with “Love, Death & Robots” — random episode orders. After some comparison, viewers began to speculate that Netflix was changing the order based on viewers’ sexualities, starting the series with an episode featuring a lesbian sex scene for LGBT+ viewers and one with a straight sex scene for hetereosexual viewers.
Netflix denied this, stating that the selection process was completely random and they have no way of knowing their viewers’ sexualities. Either way, it’s worth noting that the viewing process varies from person to person.
I’m sure opinions of this also vary, but for me, the whole series was really intense. There was so much sex and blood that I felt like I needed to take a breather after each episode and hide my screen from my roommate so she doesn’t think I’m crazy. There were also a lot of situations that didn’t feel like they needed such a prominent boob feature, but that’s a straight girl’s view.
On the bright side, all the blood and sex was beautifully animated, with some episodes feeling so realistic I forgot they weren’t, and some with such interesting artistic spins that I felt myself focusing on the style rather than the plot.
Overall, most landed in the “eh, could be better” category, but it was good enough to actually enjoy. “Love, Death & Robots” is a display of just that, animated gorgeously and written unremarkably.
