Love, Death + Robots: Initial Impressions

I’ve watched eight episodes (out of eighteen) of Netflix’s “Adult” anthology series based on contemporary SF short stories. It’s ‘Adult’ in the sense of stereotypes of adolescent male interests which means many episodes with gore and most episodes with CGI boobs. There are some good pieces but they are ones that differ sharply from the general aesthetic.

The animation ranges from interesting to video-game cut-scene aesthetic, with photo-realistic dead-eyed CGI characters hitting that just unconvincing enough to be annoying look. When it tries for something less focused on looking super-real, the show is usually more entertaining.

So far only two episodes that are genuinely good, both of which are coincidentally based on stories by John Scalzi. The first, Three Robots, is the only that makes the ultra-realism CGI work mainly by avoiding having any (living) humans in it. Instead, three very different styles of robots wander through a post-apocalyptic human city cracking jokes and trying to make sense of the decaying elements of human culture and encounter a cat.

Speaking of culture, the second episode I’d recommend is ‘When the Yogurt Took Over’. The episode eschews a realistic style and goes for a more cartoonish CGI approach to tell Scalzi’s amusing story of a sentient dairy product.

Of the OKish episodes, ‘Suits’ is about midwestern-like US famers but on an alien world besieged by creatures lifted from the movie version of Starship Troopers. No big surprises in the story but it’s nicely animated and the story is OK if you don’t think about it too much. Similarly “Sucker of Souls” is an action-adventure pastiche that doesn’t do very much but at least has its own visual style.

I’ll probably watch the rest. The ratio of ‘nope’ to ‘that was interesting’ favours the ‘nope’ but with just enough ‘interesting’ to make you think ‘maybe the next one will be good’.