Love, Death, and Robots is an animation anthology on Netflix, a series of independent animations
that all share at least two but most of the time all three of the themes love, death,
robots.
Some of the shorts are extremely graphic, there’s a lot of nudity and violence - I
don’t think I’ve seen so much on screen peen in my life - and many of the stories
are so intense you may find it difficult to to binge watch the anthology in one sitting.
The variety of styles and narratives means my favorite episodes will be different from
yours and because they are all high quality I don’t think it’s possible to critically
say which episode is “the best.”
Each episode is produced by a different animation studio than the one before, ranging from names
anybody would recognize, like Sony, to Sun Creature Studio, Vitaliy Shushko and Elena
Volk, who have created fantastic 2D-3D animation available on YouTube.
There are a couple of studios that do more than one short but you can’t tell because
they switch art styles.
And the art!
Some of the animation in Love, Death, and Robots is just so… stunning.
There are moments during Beyond the Aquila Rift (NSFW) where you can not tell it is 3D
animation.
Part of what makes the Aquila Rift characters so realistic is Unit Image’s 3D scanning
system, motion capture, and V-Ray rendering.
But don’t think high tech does everything - it’s a handful of artists creating scans,
motion capture, and pages of artists to turn that gray matter into a human being with color,
clothes, hair, animation rig bones, and convincing acting.
That’s just the characters.
Unfortunately, besides going through the character designer’s ArtStation portfolios, the best
making-of material I can find is about the sex scene in this short.
As much as I’d love to pry into any of these animations to see how they did it, the other
one I’m choosing is Zima Blue for the art style and powerful narrative.
Zima Blue is adapted from an existing short story - actually by the same author as Beyond
the Aquila Rift: Alastair Reynolds.
And the art direction for Zima Blue comes from Robert Valley, who’s worked on Gorillaz
music videos.
So you get this really pushed anatomy with heavy black character lines and shading.
What’s fascinating about the character animation is its mix between hand drawn outline and
computer tweens to slide pieces around on screen.
In this shot, you can see the texture staying perfect but Zima’s outline is boiling.
This happens because the textures are made only once for each angle of each shot, but
the lines are drawn by hand.
This isn’t always the case - see his hand here has both an unchanging texture and outline.
In this case the whole thing is one piece of art tweened.
Sometimes both mechanics play out at the same time.
In this short span the jacket’s Q shaped neck piece is pure tween even though the rest
of the outline is redrawn every time.
The result is animation that is so smooth I didn’t realize most frames were drawn
by hand until I analyzed it.
Zima Blue isn’t purely 2D, and there are quite a few 3D models.
For example, this turnaround and many of the robots are 3D.
By texturing and shading them a certain way they blend into the rest of the style nicely.
It’s the movement itself that usually gives away a 3D model, especially during slow animations
in 3D space.
It’s a little too perfect.
The same way Zima Blue is the same perfect shade of blue each time.
Have you seen any of the Love, Death, and Robots animations yet?
Comment below with your favorites and least favorites.