Love, Death and Robots: A Unique Animation Anthology Series

I haven’t written a movie review in a long time. Many things are responsible for that, but the most important has been that I haven’t seen anything worthy of writing a review about. Until today, of course.

Honestly, I’m not too sure if this movie deserves to be reviewed, because I’ll both be criticizing and commending it.

It’s something entirely different

It’s an adult animation series of completely unrelated episodes. The graphics are not censored and some pretty…adulty(if that’s even a word) stuff are been said and shown in some episodes. Each episode is a unique story about something different from the previous episodes.

This series(yeah it’s not a movie) is probably one of the most original ones I’ve seen in a long time. Almost every new movie or show these days looks like some respun (using this word cos I can’t find a better way to say it) or slight modification of another movie that’s already out there. In most of the movies released recently, you can predict very specific details of the story that should’ve been a mystery. This takes the fun out of the plot. But not for this series.

Love Death and Robots is just one of those mysterious series. You can’t even tell what the series is about from the name, unlike most others.

Oh and did I mention it’s an animation? I don’t think I needed to mention this part anymore because at this point, the cover image already gave that out.

I’ll go straight to talking about some of the very different things about this series for me.

Different animation styles

I already mentioned it’s an animation. But what I forgot to mention is that the animation styles varies across the episodes.

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The first episode opens as a Lara Croft/Alita Battle Angel-type animation with very human-like characters. I think this episode also features one of the best episodes I’ve seen so far.

But in subsequent subtitles, you see animation styles that even resemble Japanese anime. There’s also cartoon style animations and others.

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In some episodes, it’s a mix of real human characters and animations together. The varying animation styles kept me wondering what I was going to be seeing in the next episode.

Complicated rollercoaster stories

I would like to say that the episodes of this series has the best stories I’ve seen in a while. In fact, I could say that. But that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. It has some of the worst stories I’ve ever seen. But for people who think like me, even the stories I call worst are creative and so is still a great thing. The stories I call shitty, take your mind on a ride uncovering a story you didn’t think was possible from the opening of the episode.

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For instance, this one episode started out talking about a very famous artist and how his style of art evolved over time. But a quick twist comes in when at the end of the episode, we find out the artist was actually never even human.

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He (if you want to call the robot that) was a robot built by a genius in robotics about a century ago. After his (or its) creator died, he was modified several times, becoming more alive/human for each modification, and decided to express his honor to his creator by painting a blue-colored shape on all of his paintings. I was left wondering “so is he actually a bot or a human” at the end of the episode.

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I know the narration I just made was nuts. I promise you it’ll make sense if you watch the series. But this is what I might by for people that think like me. I was fascinated by how random the episode was. Almost like an episode of Family Guy - you never know what to expect. Lol

Still, amidst the very few outlier episodes, the series features some great episodes as well. I won’t go into the details of the great episodes. I’ll simply say that there’s an episode about time paradox loop, and another one about a time traveling crew being stuck in a limbo by a spider-looking monster in a phantom zone-looking planet. Lol just check the series out.

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Short episodes, great stories. Mostly.

And the best about about this series is that the episodes are short. So short you’ll be surprised when some of the episodes end. Some episodes are shorter than 5 minutes. But you still get a complete story told. Well, sorta.

I started season 1 yesterday in the afternoon and finished the 18 episodes of season 1 in about 3 hours (might be less, not sure). That’s how short the episodes are.

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I don’t give the movies I watch ratings, but I’d say this is one of the best non-japanese animation series I’ve seen in a long time and it’s definitely worth a watch.