6/30/2023 0 Comments Love death and robotsThe first season of “Love, Death and Robots” notably jumbled its episode order, as part of what was eventually confirmed as a massive platform-wide A/B test. His follow-up effort, “Ice,” is a little more of a visual showcase, but even those without a close eye on the credits list should be able to track the creative connections between the two shorts. Robert Valley’s “Zima Blue” was a Season 1 highlight, swimming in the existential nature of artificial consciousness rather than chaining it to a bazooka. Some of that comes from reintroducing past contributors who managed to break out of the show’s constricting atmosphere before. With Jennifer Yuh Nelson - director of the second and third “Kung Fu Panda” movies - taking over as Season 2’s Supervising Director, there’s a slight widening of the show’s scope, even with 10 fewer shorts to consider and a bit of the show’s earlier DNA still intact. (Though as a treat for those who are missing that vibe, one of the opening credits icons for one episode features an upside-down heart with nipples.) Thankfully, Season 2 tamps down a lot of the impulse that in the first group of episodes had many an animated woman do things like pour a bunch of champagne over her naked breasts for no discernible reason. As IndieWire’s Ben Travers wrote in his review at the time, much of Season 1 boils down to a different set of three ideas: “masculine, violent, darkness.” So throughout the first 18 episodes of “Love, Death & Robots” - largely overseen by Miller with a handful produced by his Blur Studios - there are plenty of times where someone shows a little extra skin, takes an extra kill shot, lets the blood splatter a little closer to the frame. ‘The Crown’ Expanded to Recreate the Queen’s Most Challenging Decade Heralded around its premiere as reflecting the sensibilities of its two high-profile executive producers - David Fincher and “Deadpool” director Tim Miller - most of the original 2019 batch hewed toward the kind of “adult animation” that really wants you to be conscious of both parts of that descriptor. So where does that leave Netflix’s anthology collection of animated shorts, each ostensibly drawing on at least one of that trio? “Love, Death & Robots,” debuting an eight-episode Season 2 over two years after its first, continues to be a vague, mystifying catch-all. And that’s all even before addressing the idea that love is an emotion tied to caring about someone so much that you’re afraid to live without them. We’re usually either afraid of robots that could possibly kill us or attracted by the implication of a robot incapable of dying. For one thing, it’s repetitive: part of the inherent appeal of fictional robots is that they feast on our uncomfortable relationship with death. “Love, Death & Robots” doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense as a title.
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