The Magic, Severed Hand: Notes on the Lush, Morbid, and Investigative Animation of “Love Death + Robots”
At eight years old I realized I didn’t belong in sports. I was destined to be a designer, a writer—gentler things that didn’t involve frantic running, throbbing muscles, pushing and shoving. In almost all of our P.E. class’s games, I faced my classmate Andrew’s repeated pump fakes, his noodly arms tricking me into a state of caution. “Psych!” he’d spit out, puncturing an air thick with panting. I despised this taunting since I hadn’t even mastered the basics, always catching up. To not have a plan in life became a heart-thump, a nightmare even. If only I could move to the right place, feel with precision the future.
A few years ago, I kind of got over it. Part of it involved a strange series I discovered on Netflix called Love Death + Robots. I was utterly shocked by each of its stories, animated to embrace the fantastical, the wild—that which is misleading and deliciously subversive. To delight in the surprises found in the unknown became the show’s ultimate urge.
The animated anthology series, created by Tim Miller, employs science-fiction, horror, and fantasy to dazzle and make trouble. In that process, a ruthless, tongue-in-cheek exploration of irony unfolds. Technology is questioned with finality. The human condition is tested in a spectrum of unique circumstances: across dystopian worlds, alternate realities, and extraterrestrial landscapes, characters face nightmarish situations that involve machines, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence, among other futuristic entities. These stories lay down environments and fill them with failure and slaughter and longing. They are obsessed with poking fun as much as they are offering serrated critique.
My attention didn’t falter as I swallowed the three volumes after each other. The show pulls viewers in first with its jaw-dropping visuals. I gasped at the intricacy of the machines, the cluttered backgrounds, the almost believable slimy skin of the alien monsters. That balance will forever be impressive: the ability to convince an audience that this fictional beast could maybe be possible is a difficult task and one that warrants immediate respect for the writers and animators. The stretching, crushing, enlarging, and decapitating of the human body seem to actualize on screen with unimaginable ease, which masks the hours needed to pull off an illusion of rational physics and vivid texture. This show has all the animators’ skills laid out on a buffet, their artistry and meticulousness and spellbinding discipline. The anthology celebrates the work of artists across the planet without compromising their unique visual languages. Each short, produced by a different animation studio, captures a specific animation style, which makes clicking the Next Episode button anticipatory and almost electric—it is impossible to predict what the next story will look like. The experience of whizzing through several episodes back to back in the framing of a season is vivifying, overwhelming, and waggish at once.
The poetry is undeniable. Love Death + Robots invites us to see animation as a way to test, probe, and hypothesize. The intimacy of unencumbered artistic exploration layers, like mist, somewhere above the action. The filmmakers hope to push the visual and storytelling capabilities of digital art, to show us the unexpected and roll around in it. They have long passed the finish line erected by Pixar: now, the task is to bring to life people who go through challenging, out-of-this-planet situations while also rattling our shoulders with the vague suggestion that we are hurtling toward those circumstances.
These Black Mirror-esque projections, these cautionary tales, are supposed to sear the mind, show off some tooth. They ponder the things we tend to dismiss, those alternate timelines that combine the wrong chemicals in the test tube. Every time I return to this show I remember that feeling of eccentricity that comes with being okay to ask the challenging questions and embracing the confidence needed to announce your intrusive thoughts to the world around you. There’s something beautifully indecent about it.
We are also invited to probe. We are summoned to the screen to try to figure out from the opening lines of dialogue what world we are entering, what its rules are, and who are its key players. How is what I’m about to experience going to relate to the three words of the title? We are thrown into a picture frame, attempting to guess at what lies behind the white wall sprawling about its edges. We guess, but can never quite know. The sometimes ambiguous endings of the shorts often feel painstaking. If only we got a little more information. This game of touch-and-go is about mystery. Because each story doesn’t last very long, the frequency at which we can engage in the pull of that mystery again is fast. Fast enough it burns sometimes.
The game is also about concision. The show respects the glass domes encircling each story, maintaining consistency even within the turns in their plots. By inviting us to watch a pared-down set of people, places, and props get juggled around each other, the animators are able to push the depth of each facet of the narrative, fizzle appetite coolly. This is perhaps why the ultra-detailed highlights sparkling each CGI pore of a cheek, for example, work. We only have a couple of elements. They only have each other. The chasms deepen. We focus and focus until the last frame. We hang onto its afterimage desperately.
Above all else, the shock of death pounds the bell. I flinch at the bloody volcanoes that become of the characters’ heads when shot to death by their enemies, flinch again at the intestines gushing out on the floor from a stomach, purse lips before a ghoulish, decaying skin. The horror combines with the dialogue, which almost always emphasizes passion, and becomes more than just a cheap grasp in the dark for a pair of eyes—it becomes duty-bound, ultimate. We need, sometimes, to push against the fragility of the body to achieve heartfelt revelation, to encourage unfettered honesty. Love Death + Robots opened my eyes to how horror as a genre can amplify the devastation found in the process of loving. This is possible because of the shorts’ dialogue—text rich in detail and flashing with intention. Surprising twists in Volume 3’s “Bad Travelling,” both in kills and in the characters’ lines, were über-smart jabs, tiny Psych’s that stepped after each other in a display of coordinated, utterly daring writing.
I return to the show, also, with a sense of anger. Rewatching Volume 1 in particular, I encountered a host of paper-flat women who existed primarily to provide pleasure to the films’ male leads. As a viewer, I sensed sour-mouthed the domination of men in the creative process and the projection of their subconscious fantasies into worlds that begrudgingly remained hypermasculine. The women tended to hover around the burly, stoic protagonists, flashing breasts in loose dresses or offering themselves up for raunchy sex. I would often think to myself that the power imbalance between the genders was painful. It felt outdated, and always shaved off the beauty found in the magic of the speculation on screen, bringing me back down to attitudes I thought we were long past. The showrunners should improve how they portray women without holding onto the stereotypical, subordinate role outlined by older film projects. I hope this improvement happens as the series builds.
Love Death + Robots possesses a charm that allows itself to undo our expectations in a cycle of reshaping. Its gritty malice flashes. Its exquisitely drawn worlds unpack sequences of consequence that seem straight out of a dreamscape. Watching this show, I learned to more fluidly clutch onto the double-take, the feigned calmness of silence, flipping between trust and distrust of the visuals before me. To see the pushing and shoving and yelling and violence as assertions, though obviously wrongful, of yearning, of wanting. I wander into the tattered urban void. I press myself into the glass of the spacesuit to glance back at my freezing, mutilated arm. I look under the Christmas tree and find a salivating, toothy demon. I pass by a hundred skeletons rotting in a diner. I run away from somersaulting alien whales with a group of teenagers. I watch the hand sever from the arm at the wrist, fall to the ground with a thud. All of these huddled together under the most assertive, comically straightforward title. Without a doubt, this series of films remains an impressive expression of animation. It offers places to reevaluate, feel free, get lost in something ravishing. I expect it to continue to enrapture me time and time again.