Love, Death, Robots is an anthology of short science-fiction films, presented in animated format (or heavily CGI-inflected images). The individual pictures differ radically in style, although unfortunately not so much in content. (They are uniformly hyper-violent with gross-out gore effects and, rather, monotonously similar plots.) As one might expects, some of the short films are superb; others are predictable and dull-witted, although all of the episodes are visually spectacular. Nine episodes comprise the 2022 series. Two of animations are masterpieces: "Night of the Mini-Dead" and "Jibaro".
Most of the nine programs feature monsters slaughtering humans by ripping their bodies to gory shreds. In three of the shorts, ghastly creatures make human corpses talk for them. A giant mechanized bear attacks soldiers in Afghanistan; spider-like critters with human faces devour a team of soldiers in another segment. People get their eyes gouged out and their ears amputated. In nature, there is a process called carcinisation -- that is, the alarming tendency for animals in disparate species to evolve into something like crabs. Giant, murderous crabs are featured in several sections, proving that carcinisation applies even to animation. In one film, three jaunty robots explore human dwellings filled with mummified corpses and skeletons -- humanity has predictably massacred itself. This episode is pretty funny and doesn't succumb to the gruesome solemnity of most of the other sequences. A poetic 16 minute film tracks the doom of a female astronaut who is absorbed into the moon of Io, a giant machine, as it turns out, that has been devised "to know" her. (We can't tell whether the woman's is hallucinating her encounter with the machine which speaks to her, predictably enough in this series, through her mutilated dead comrade whom she is dragging behind her for some unknown reason). In another sequence, called "The Swarm", two mostly naked explorers swim through a giant colony of crustacean (yes, crab-like) creatures sentient as a whole and immensely old and wise. The crustaceans, who look like giant fleas with giant tentacles, communicate through a dead woman pinioned in a vaginal-looking fissure in the colony's organic walls. "The Swarm" absorbs those who encounter it and turn them into a molluscs who are parasitic on the colony -- of course, the humans claim that they will never become subservient parasites in the tentacle-flea colony but, of course, we know this is only wishful thinking. These episodes are mostly poorly thought-out but brilliantly animated and they tend to end abruptly as if their creators simply ran out of time, or more likely, money.
The two masterpieces in the third series are so good that they make watching the entire 100 minute anthology worthwhile. Both of these films are excellent primarily because of their astonishing visual style. In "Night of the Mini-dead", a couple desecrate a cemetery arousing a horde of zombies. The zombies wreak havoc everywhere and take over the world, finally inducing a nuclear catastrophe that results in the earth being destroyed -- an event of no significance as shown in the final shots of the Milky Way galaxy. This plot is time-worn and a cliche, but the animation is spectacular. The scenes feature miniature sets, little villages, cities, roadways over which the swarms of walking dead rage. Each shot is filmed from an aerial perspective as a tableaux. Human voices are recorded as speeded-up -- it's funny to hear dire pronouncements presented in the helium-inflected voices of chipmunks. The little movie reminds us that consequence is a matter of perspective -- when we see the world end in miniature, it's like a callous child stamping on ants. It just doesn't matter. This is a splendid and very funny little film.
Even more astonishing is "Jibaro". The animation in this movie (by Albert Mielgo) is so strange and stunning that the stupid plot is utterly immaterial. A group of armored conquistadors is pushing their way through a forest. In a lagoon, the soldiers encounter a water-spirit, a destructive figure something like a siren or Undine. The water-spirit is covered in gold and jewels and dances sinuously in the shallows of the lake. When she shrieks, the conquistadors go mad, slashing one another to death, and drowning themselves in the water. But one of the conquistadors is deaf. He can't hear the siren's deadly cry and so survives. Later, he fights with the creature, possibly rapes her, and steals the gold covering her body. When he head-butts her into unconsciousness, for some reason, his hearing is restored and her cry (when she discovers herself despoiled of her gold) drives him mad and we see his corpse sinking to the bottom of the gem and gold-filled lagoon; layers of dead conquistadors are also bedded in the deep. There's no story here, just a situation -- and the motif of the deaf warrior reminds me of Ambrose Bierce's horrific short story "Chickamauga" in which a six-year deaf child witnesses a Civil War battle. But the animation is incredible, memorable in its own right -- everything glows with the amber of gold and the demon's thrashing, viper-like dance in the shallows of the lagoon is so extraordinary that the viewer feels half-entranced himself, caught in the wild eerie spell of the siren. I think the film is supposed to have something to do with the conquistadors' lust for gold, but any meaning that the movie might possess is utterly subsumed by its baffling beauty.
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