Love, Death + Robots Volume 2 trailer

[Rhodan]

Looks lovely and robotly...

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[Bry_Sinclair]

Adored the first volume. Some amazing story telling, brilliant characters, gorgeous visuals, and pretty much every segment left me wanting an entire season in their respective universes.

So cannot wait for the second!!!!!

 

[Q2UnME]

Cool Beans! I really enjoyed the first outing. Can't wait!
Q2

 

[FPAlpha]

Best news of the day!

Volume 1 was so amazing, i loved the different styles and stores, which are so extremely varied.

May 14th can't come soon enough!

 

[eschaton]

So, the second season of Love Death, and Robots just dropped today. It's much shorter than the first - only 8 episodes as opposed to Season 1's 18. This short season may partially be due to COVID, but word is a third season is coming in 2022, so they just may have decided to hold over half the shorts to next year. Netflix often does this with animated series.

My general thoughts: First, the season wisely drops the needless T&A and ultraviolence which the first season attempted to use to be "mature" but really came across as juvenile. It just feels like a straight-ahead SF anthology series now, and is all the better for it. While the storytelling is still pretty diverse, it feels less all over the place in terms of animation style and tone than the first season as well.

Anyway, let's go through, episode by episode:

Automated Customer Service: One of the only two comedic shorts in this season, this episode is based upon a John Scalzi story, and uses a pretty unrealistic, Pixar-like (though purposefully ugly) animation style. We are introduced into what seems like a futuristic version of The Villages (a town composed entirely of retirees) which have their every need catered to by robots. An elderly woman who lives alone with her dog ends up in trouble because her home vacuum bot goes rogue and begins trying to kill her, and she must use her wits to overcome it. There is relatively little dialogue in the skit, other than the automated voice on the customer service line. The skit is...fine. I think it's really hard to properly balance action with life-and-death stakes with the black comedy they attempt here, and it didn't quite hit emotionally.

Ice: The only short this season which uses predominantly 2D-style animation, this short follows two teenage brothers who have just migrated from Earth to a frozen colony planet. The older brother is the only un-augmented young person on the planet, which is causing issues fitting in. I won't go into the details of the plot, but I will note that this short manages to construct full character arcs for the brothers in the course of a runtime which is (discounting credits) only around ten minutes. Still pretty lightweight, but much more impressive than the first.

Pop Squad: A dark, noir short based upon a story by Paulo Bacigalupi, this is one of the standout episodes of the season. It focuses on a future society where immortality becomes possible, but in an effort to stop population growth, strict limits on procreation are put in place - which includes the death penalty for any children discovered. The focus character is a cop who experiences a crisis of faith following his last shooting of two small children. Once again the main character has a complete character arc over the course of the 15-minute runtime. If there's any downside, it's that it feels like there was enough story potential here for a full-length story. Oh, and the animation is in the uncanny valley zone - it would have been better either with a bit more polish or more stylized.

Snow in the Desert: A Mad-Max style action adventure story, this short (based upon a story by Neal Asher) focuses on an albino man on an off-world planet who has bounty placed on his head because of his unique biological status (he is capable of rapid healing - to the point of quickly regrowing limbs, and functionally immortal. A woman comes to his rescue at a critical time, and they travel together as the story heads into its final confrontation. This episode packs a lot into its 15-minute runtime - two action sequences and some character development (albeit not as much as the previous two shorts), along with a strictly PG-13 sex scene. I feel like the story suffers a bit too much from telling rather than showing, but it's still one of the better outings. The animation better than Pop Squad as well - almost believable in some cases. It really made me wish for a full-length action movie based upon the short.

The Tall Grass: A bespectacled man (who is voiced by Joe Dempsie - Gendry from GoT) is taking a train at night (seems to be a Victorian-era setting), when the train suddenly stops. He gets out, and sees lights in the grass. The conductor tells him not to wander, which he of course ignores, and he gets attacked by zombie things. Then the conductor saves him, and tells his tale. That's literally all that happens. It has an interesting artistic style, but there's essentially no plot, only two characters, and no character development to speak of. A very insubstantial short.

All Through the House: The shortest entry by far this season, with only five minutes of runtime excluding credits, this is another "comedic" entry. The story opens with two children in their beds at 2 AM Christmas day, thinking they heard Santa downstairs. When they sneak down, they discover not Santa, but an eldritch alien monster, which surprisingly declares both of the children were nice, and vomits up presents for them which were what they actually wanted for Christmas...although the children wonder what might have happened if they were naughty. The short works well due to the sudden tonal shifts from saccharine to terrifying, and back again. They also picked a very good animation style for a Christmas short - rendering the kids so that they look kinda like clay or wax models, and purposefully using a low frame rate to give it the stop-motion feel of a decades-old show.

Life Hutch: Based upon a story by Harlan Ellison, this short has certifiable star power, with Michael B. Jordan in the starring (really only) role. His face in particular was hyper-realistic, to the point I am left wondering if they really used CGI or he did some live acting and they ported it into a CGI set. Regardless, he plays a soldier whose fighter crash lands on an airless planet. While there is refuge nearby (the "life hutch") the repair bot in the refuge has gone haywire, attacks him immediately, and attempts to kill him every time he moves. He must then figure out some way to outsmart the killer robot while dealing with multiple debilitating injuries. It's fine for what it is, but it's absolutely a plot/action driven piece, not a character-driven one, as we know nothing about him.

The Drowned Giant: Based upon a short story by J.G. Ballard, this "story" is about the naked body of a giant washing up on the seashore of what appears to be the English countryside. The structure of the short is unusual, insofar as it's nothing other than an internal monologue that the main character (a bystander who sees the giant when it first lands, and watches the body as it slowly decomposes/is disassembled) regales to...the audience? His diary? It's not entirely sure, but I'm guessing that much of this monologue was lifted from the original story word for word. Despite this, it manages to work, as the surreal visuals (the short is rendered realistically, but a 60-ton giant can't help but be surreal), seaside setting, and reminiscence of the narrator set a cohesive tone. The short gets a slight downgrade because it tries to be photo-realistic but falls into uncanny valley territory, but this is a small flaw with an otherwise good short.

 

[TedShatner10]

Volume 2 was more focused and consistent than Volume 1, with no lurid excessive duds like "The Dump", "The Witness", and "Alternate Histories", but in the process it ended up having less energy and experimentation.

Also Covid may have likely played a role in lower episode output and less emphasis on hand drawn looking animation.

 

[Q2UnME]

Watched all of the second season of Love Death & Robots last night in one sitting, which wasn't a slog because of the short run times and reduced episode count. All in all, I enjoyed it but was left wanting more. This one smacks of having the available episodes cut into two season. Would not be surprised if Season 3 is announced shortly and it will also consist of 8 episodes. Anyway, liked most of the shorts, but felt there was only 1 or 2 gems in this outing. Season 1 was a bit stronger....
Q2

 

[777]

has anyone watched Season 3 yet? Just dropped this past weekend

 

[Jedi Marso]

has anyone watched Season 3 yet? Just dropped this past weekend

Did not know that! Thanks for the mention!

Lucky 13 is still my favorite episode of this series. I could watch a whole show based off it.

 

[eschaton]

has anyone watched Season 3 yet? Just dropped this past weekend

I did...my Season 3 review:

The new season is 9 episodes, making it more similar to Season 2's 8 episodes than Season 1's 18. Overall the tone is sort of midway between Seasons 1 and 2. While the sexploitation of Season 1 didn't return here in any real way (there are a handful of sex scenes, but it's not exploitative), the level of "kewl" gore is pretty goddamned high in several of the shorts. Overall this is a very schizoid season, with some episodes telling mature, adult SF, and others apparently seeking to appeal to 14 year old boys. I also need to say that in several of the shorts I thought the sound was mixed fairly poorly, as I had a hard time understanding the dialogue even with the volume turned up fairly high (I probably should have watched with the subtitles on).

Okay, so on to the skits themselves:

Three Robots: Exit Strategies: The first sequel to a LD+R short, this returns to the...three robots...we met in Season 1 for another script written by John Scalzi. The animation style is identical of course, making this a more stylized "Pixar" type short. In this short, the three robots visit various vacant human settlements to see how different groups of humans attempted to deal with the "robot apocalypse" (spoiler - they all failed). There's a lot of long-dead dried up corpses/skeletons, but I wouldn't call it gory. There's also a ton of political commentary here, including some that genuinely surprised/amused me (they worked in a nice dig on libertarians and seasteading), but the message in the end is just a little bit too on the nose for me.

Bad Traveling: This short is based upon a story by Neil Asher. A ship sailing across an "alien ocean" (not clear if this was meant to be a fantasy setting, it's rather low-tech) ends up with a murderous giant crab who storms the ship and threatens to kill everyone onboard unless steered to an inhabited island where it can kill countless individuals. A single individual does everything he can to ensure this doesn't happen - even if it means betraying everyone else on the ship. This short has an odd animation style, it's not really either attempting to be hyper-real or cartoonish. Characters are naturally lit and rendered in great detail, but their features are exaggerated just a bit outside the real human norm - probably to avoid the "uncanny valley" issue. This is a hyper-gory short, but it tells a coherent story with a character arc of sorts for the protagonist, though everyone else is disposable - in more ways than one. It's the longest of the shorts, at 21 minutes (longest short yet done by the series) but the runtime just isn't enough for the story they try to tell here.

The Very Pulse of the Machine: Based on a story by Michael Swanwick, we begin this short with two scientists exploring the moon Io in a rover. After a crash caused by a volcanic eruption, one of them dies, with the surviving scientist having a critical rupture in her own oxygen supply, requiring her to link her own suit to her dead crewmate, and drag her body on a makeshift sled for 40 km to the return vehicle. During the return journey, she starts hearing the voice of her dead crewmate, and it gets more interesting from there. The animation style in this particular short is 2D, almost having a hand-painted quality at times. It is quite clearly the most beautiful of the shorts, and is a mature science-fiction story told quite well. The standout of the season by far.

Night of the Mini Dead: What if there was a zombie apocalypse, but we filmed it in tilt shift? That's basically all there is to this seven-minute short. There is no script to speak of here, though there were some high-pitched lines which were audible. But basically it was one zombie movie cliché after another, only viewed as if we were looking down on a model railroad track. There some gore here (and surprisingly sex), but it's so far zoomed out it's not really objectionable. I just don't find the idea of tiny people dying all that funny.

Kill Team Kill: This is awful - the primary evidence that they're going after the 14-year-old boy demographic again with the show. We meet a squad of soldiers - really cliché soldiers who all have southern-ish accents (and oddly, are all white), talk about how awesome guns are, swear incessantly, etc. Then they get attacked by a giant cyborg grizzly bear. Yes, really. The animation style in this episode is traditional 2D style, which is somewhat helpful, as this is one of the goriest of the shorts, and I would not want to watch this at all if it. Also of note is this is one of the few shorts this season with some big name voice actors in it, like Seth Green and Steve Blum. My least favorite of the season.

The Swarm: Based upon a Bruce Stirling story, this short follows a scientist who travels to an alien...asteroid?...filled with a sort of alien hive organism which also has integrated dozens of different alien species (many of which used to be spacefaring races) into its ecology. The only other human character here is another scientist played by Rosario Dawson. The animation here is so close to being stellar, as the creature design is among the best (if not the absolute best) I've ever seen in CGI, but the human animation attempts to be photo-realistic and fails. There's a sex scene here, but it's strictly PG-13, and the gore level is relatively subdued and appropriate to the story. Aside from the uncanny valley humans (who I do get used to over time) the main issue with this episode is it feels like it adapted the short story a bit too faithfully, meaning there's two long, expository bits of dialogue which just don't seem to mesh well with the rest of the short. Still worth seeing for the creature design alone.

Mason's Rats: A Scottish farmer's rats evolve to become hyper-intelligent and start using tools. He hires an exterminating company which uses progressively more and more technological solutions in an attempt to wipe out the rats to no avail. As a story attempting to be "comedic" the art style is closer to Pixar, though it's still fairly gory. The one thing I will say in the favor of this short is in a series replete with very dark endings where everyone dies, this one at least manages to end on a bit of a bright note. Oddly, it is also based upon a Neil Asher story.

In His Vaulted Halls Entombed: What if a group of commandos discovers Cthulhu chained up inside a cave? That's pretty much all there is to this story. I will say unlike Kill Team Kill, this short actually portrays members of the armed forces as people, not as broad caricatures. It also has better use of "photo-realistic" animation than The Swarm (although the faces still do seem a little too unexpressive for me). This is a completely 100% cliché horror story though - you're not going to be surprised in any way at all at how it ends.

Jibaro: The final short of the season is something I was really looking forward to based upon the clips from the trailer, but it was a huge letdown. This short is done by Pinkman.tv, who also did The Witness from Season 1, and similar to that short there is something of an artistic, painterly quality to the short. Also similarly, it has no dialogue whatsoever, and attempts to tell its story entirely visually. What that story is, however, is kind of confusing. What I can gather is a group of Spanish Conquistadors is traveling through the forest (a weirdly not-tropical looking forest) looking for treasure, and stumble upon a goddess/mythical being who uses her powers (mostly screaming) to make them all kill each other/drown, save for a single knight who happens to be deaf and thus immune. The mythical being also happens to be covered with gold - and to be a kind of hot lady. There's no real sex in this episode, and there's not that much gore (but there sure is a hell of a lot of blood). The main issue with the short is the direction and editing are absolutely terrible, with tons of quick cuts and odd camera angles (do I really need repeated cutbacks to view the knight as if I'm sitting on his horse's neck facing him?). When coupled with the more stylized/painterly animation style, and the weird dance shit the mythical being does, it feels like this is a long cut from a music video rather than a short story.