Love, Death & Robots | Little White Lies

Love, Death & Robots

12 Mar 2019 / Released: 15 Mar 2019 / US: 15 Mar 2019

Two people gazing at a dystopian city skyline with industrial chimneys and smoke.
Two people gazing at a dystopian city skyline with industrial chimneys and smoke.
3

Anticipation.

It’s an anthology – some of it has to be good, right?

2

Enjoyment.

Less of this is good than one might hope.

1

In Retrospect.

By the final short, you’ve already forgotten which ones were good.

This NSFW ani­mat­ed anthol­o­gy sees Tim Miller and David Finch­er team up to dis­as­trous effect.

From the algo­rith­mic favour gen­er­at­ed by the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Black Mir­ror comes Netflix’s newest anthol­o­gy show­piece, like­wise sit­u­at­ed at the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­o­gy and imag­i­na­tion. Under the aus­pices of exec­u­tive pro­duc­ers Tim Miller (of Dead­pool noto­ri­ety) and David Finch­er (who is David Finch­er), 18 dif­fer­ent ani­ma­tion teams con­vened for a col­lec­tion of shorts per­tain­ing in one way or anoth­er to automa­tons, cyborgs, or androids.

The wide vari­ance in visu­al styles, the­mat­ic con­cerns, and base­line com­pe­tence makes the Love, Death & Robots dif­fi­cult to assess as a whole. But even when con­sid­ered in aggre­gate, the com­mon through­lines that emerge do not flat­ter the enter­prise. Most glar­ing among them: the many, many ani­mé tits. Sev­er­al seg­ments have been trans­par­ent­ly con­ceived as flim­sy excus­es for dig­i­tal artists to pon­der the mechan­ics of jig­gling and prop­er cel-shad­ing tech­nique for nipples.

So numer­ous and promi­nent­ly fea­tured are the car­toon breasts – one part sends a sex work­er scram­bling nude for her life through a futur­is­tic bor­del­lo, anoth­er ren­ders a sap­ph­ic hookup with the sweaty leer of a peep­ing tom, a third visu­alis­es the pen­du­lous prow of an anthro­po­mor­phised fox-babe – that one ques­tions the util­i­ty of plat­form­ing the series on a machine already capa­ble of googling up two-dimen­sion­al mam­maries with a few keystrokes.

An empha­sis on hol­low tech­ni­cal accom­plish­ment at the expense of sto­ry unites the remain­der of the selec­tions, which move through their beats with the mechan­i­cal life­less­ness of, well, a robot. Sonnie’s Edge’ exists for the sake of its cen­tre­piece spec­ta­cle, a dog­fight between tele­path­i­cal­ly con­trolled behe­moths that for­gets to first con­vince the audi­ence to give a damn about the outcome.

Suck­er of Souls’ and Lucky 13’ also do lit­tle beyond pro­vid­ing a ves­sel for an intri­cate bit of show-offery that an emerg­ing direc­tor can use as their call­ing card; short-form cin­e­ma, stream­lined into a siz­zle reel.

The seg­ments not pre­oc­cu­pied with prov­ing their own badassery have a bet­ter go of their brief time slots, cap­i­tal­is­ing on the elas­tic­i­ty of the project’s loose premise. The rules (of which there appear to be none, real­ly; Suck­er of Souls’ and the expo­nen­tial­ly more intrigu­ing Ice Age’ don’t even have any cir­cuit­ry-based enti­ties) can allow for an infomer­cial for a ser­vice sim­u­lat­ing the out­come of alter­nate time­lines, or a wry­ly fun­ny tour through the wreck­age of civilisation.

You’ve seen one post-apoc­a­lyp­tic city, you’ve seen em all,” goes the mus­ing of one cyber­net­ic vaca­tion­er, in an unwit­ting indict­ment of approx­i­mate­ly twelve of the oth­er episodes. Suits’ forges a tru­ly nov­el farm­land-of-the-future aes­thet­ic, Fish Night’ uses roto­scop­ing to syn­the­sise an ocean of neon ghosts, and The Dump’ looks like a Pixar’s Up mired in cozy garbage.

Still, that leaves plen­ty of oth­ers to dis­solve into a homo­ge­neous soup of slick­ness and gra­tu­itous vio­lence. The self-con­tained arms race of pho­to­re­al­ism rag­ing between Help­ing Hand’, Lucky 13’, and oth­ers lays bare that the fact some crews sim­ple had access to supe­ri­or equip­ment. This con­trast doesn’t make the sharp­er footage look any bet­ter, it only makes the rest look primitive.

The gen­er­al lack of sophis­ti­ca­tion cues up all man­ner of cute, sit­u­a­tion­al­ly appro­pri­ate word­play: they’ve got prob­lems with faulty wiring, bugs to work out, glitch­es in the code. The real issue cuts deep­er than that, though, to the same bar­ri­er that mod­ern robot­ics strives in vain to over­come even today.

How­ev­er advanced our tech­nol­o­gy, it means noth­ing with­out com­pas­sion to guide its use. To quote a tru­ly great work about the haz­ards of robot­ics, There can be no under­stand­ing between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.”

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