With streaming services like Netflix bringing more and more content to our homes, there can often seem like there is simply too much to wade through. On the other hand, with more movies and television comes more variety, and we end up coming across things we would never have had the chance to see before.
One such strange experiment is Love, Death + Robots, a new sci-fi series being added to Netflix. This series of short episodes, ranging from six to 18 minutes long, are all completely different from one another - in plot, style, and tone.
The one thing uniting them, loosely, is the title; but its themes can range from good-natured fun to violent nihilism, and with plenty of twists to go with it - earning it many comparisons to Black Mirror from those who have had the chance to watch it.
"Delivering bleakness and black comedy in distilled form via stories that rarely last more than fifteen minutes," the Daily Beast's review reads, "it’s like Black Mirror for the ADD-addled video game crowd."
The show was executive produced by David Fincher, the director known for the likes of Fight Club and Seven, and Deadpool director Tim Miller - and each episode is directed by a different filmmaker. You can tell how wide-ranging the styles are within the movie just from this, frankly eyeball-melting trailer:
As far as what it's about, it's a little hard to pin down. "We always thought there was an audience for it, but it was a very difficult thing to pitch," David Fincher told the crowd at SXSW Festival earlier this year.
"What we wanted to do was find stories and find artists and find directors, animators, production companies that we could build a sandbox for. Hopefully they'll take root, and hopefully, we'll get to make more weird, different kind of stuff."
The original press release for the trailer described it as Netflix's "first ever animated anthology series" that draws from the '70s comic books that influenced both Miller and Fincher as filmmakers:
"The full roster of stories will cover a variety of adult topics including racism, government, war, free will, and human nature The anthology collection spans the science fiction, fantasy, horror and comedy genres and each short has a unique animation style: from traditional 2D to photo-real 3D CGI.
"The creators were assembled for a global calling for best in class animators from all over the world including artists from France, Korea, Hungary, Canada and the US among others. The series draws inspiration from the eclectic and provocative comic book material from the 1970's that influenced both Miller’s and Fincher’s formative interests in storytelling."
The fact that there's no ongoing story may make it a little less binge-able, but it does mean you can drop in and out of it rather than committing to watching a whole season to find out what what happens next.
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