Premiers this Friday! Yes, please.
When the thread got bumped a few weeks back it reminded me to finish this up. So good and I didn’t realize when I first started watching it that they were all based on short stories. I loved them all and am really looking forward to the next batch. Plus I’ve added a bunch of fresh reading material to the backlog.
Happy dance! We must celebrate the little joys during this difficult time.
Just watched all 8 new episodes. All in all, a mixed bag. Just like the first season.
Favorite - All Through the House
Good - Pop Squad, Snow in the Desert, Automated Customer Service
Ok - Ice, Life Hutch, Tall Grass
Not sure what to think - The Drowned Giant
Has there ever been an anthology series of any kind that is uniformly excellent?
I don’t see how we would expect anthologies to be uniformly excellent; that would be the exception. Among ourselves we already disagree on whether a single tv show or movie is good.
By definition an anthology just a whole bunch of different stuff put together? Especially so in a visual medium where you may like an art style that I may not. That just compounds the whole “uniformly excellent” issue.
I thought Snow in the Desert was amazing! Talk about world building. I want that episode to be the opening scene of a full movie set in that world.
And the CG was amazing, as it was in The Drowned Giant. They’ve really nailed materials and lighting, but human faces are still not quite right. They’ve made great strides with making them look more real when not in motion, but once they start talking we’re still in the uncanny valley IMO.
Ice and Tall Grass were super weak. I kinda liked Life Hutch but there wasn’t much to it, and Automated Customer Service was fun.
Pop Squad was a bit too over the top for me. But it’s an interesting subject to tackle: how do you manage a world where people are effectively immortal? Most sci-fi that I’ve read that have that in play rely on there being additional worlds for the population to spread out to.
The first episode of the first season, 3 Robots, is still my favorite, though.
Agreed.
Just FYI
It was impressive, but that was one of those animations where it was so photorealistic I felt it might as well have been live action. I’m not sure what it gained by being animated.
I’ve not started watching this yet but that’s my general feeling with pursuing photo/videorealism in animation. It’s like hyperreal art: it’s an incredible technical flex but the result is something that looks indistinguishable from the real thing. I’ll always value an interesting, expressive or unusual style over pure technical wizardry, even though I still appreciate the craft that goes into the latter as well! This was touched on in the Mitchells vs. the Machines thread.
I think my favourite from the first season was Zima Blue. Looking forward to sitting down with this one.
Are these demo pitches from different animation studios? They’re like visual showcases, hung on whatever narrative was handy. If you said they were NVidia demos I’d believe you…
The second seaon not only has been much shorter than the first, the quality level has decreased too. Most of them where just ‘meh’.
Ah, that explains it–I went to finish up any stragglers from S1 a few nights ago, and it looked like the S1 episode order had changed from what I remembered. At first I was rather confused as to why I had watched some of them out of order, but then I just shrugged and went by what Netflix indicated I had not yet watched.
Volume 1 for me started with Three Robots and ended with Zima Blue which I think was almost perfect.
Same here.
Mine ended with Zima Blue, which I thought was about right, but I could see it the other way too. I got 3 Robots first, which worked for me.
I think The Witness in the first season kind of hit both, still one of the more impressive pieces of animation still. stunned it’s not rotoscoped or motion captured.
As to Season 2, I kind of feel like they tried to tone down the edginess somewhat and I think that kind of ended up hurting it a little oddly.
I lot of season two didn’t actually have love, death, and robots. Many episodes only had two of the three things. Tall Grass and Drowned Giant certainly didn’t have love or robots, and they barely even had death. C’mon, Tim Miller and David Fincher, get your acts together!
For the record, my favorite was Pop Squad. And please save me a seat on the bandwagon for folks whose favorite in season one was Three Robots.
-Tom
Was the Tall Grass guy meant to be H.P. Lovecraft because they just put a Lovecraft scene in Love Death+Robots.
Also All Through the House. Same difference.