Ok, I finished watching Love Death & Robots yesterday, time to comment! Only a few lines per episode, I don’t have time for more:
"Sonnie’s Edge" : Good. Well paced, nice revelation at the end, good art, characters reminded me a bit of the style used in Dishonored, btw. I guessed the blond girl was bad news, but I didn’t guess the true nature of the MC, although it was perfectly guessable, looking back in hindsight.
"Three Robots" : Eh. It was pleasant enough, I guess, but ultimately forgettable. Too on the nose with the jokes. It seems placed to server as a breather between the first and third episode, which were more ‘edgy’.
"The Witness": Amazing photorealism in several scenes, combined with the more cartoon-like faces, made for a very interesting art style. It was unnecessarily edgy in parts (it really didn’t affect anything to the story), but that’s almost par the course with shorts like this, when they give no restrictions of subject to creators accustomed to more limits and restrictions. Cool end, there was no explanation for the time loop, if there was a time loop, but it kind of doesn’t matter, right?
"Suits" : Entertaining and well realized short, although obviously it isn’t very deep or anything. The drama, while basic and limited as they are with time, was well done.
"Sucker of Souls" : This surprised me as obviously it’s the first without science fiction elements. With the title I thought all of them were scifi. Deep as a puddle, of course, and it has some very trite dialog lines, but I liked it because I thought the action direction on the first scenes (and in general) was superb. Really good camera movement, enhancing the tension, while still giving a very easy to follow action for the audience. And the animation was smooth as hell of course.
"When The Yogurt Took Over" : Nice one. Good, cute style, simple, but with a nice core idea of the yogurt manipulating the situation from the start while being a ‘benign dictator’.
"Beyond the Aquila Rift" : Another of the good ones. Amazing photo realism in a good amount of scenes, and the end really surprised me. The obvious thing was that the woman was obsessed with him since their last fling and had manipulated everything, but it wasn’t that. Surprisingly, I read some people where their take on it was a simple ‘bad aliens were laying a trap to catch ships!’. Uh… it seems obvious enough that the real twist here is that the ugly looking alien IS really honest, and they were a peaceful, empathetic species (which contrast with our prejudices of what good aiens and bad aliens look like, like the human prejudices of the crew) and they didn’t have anything to do with the accidents, they just are receiving at their nest the starships because there is a glitch in the human gate system a galaxy of distance away; so they are doing whatever they can given the bad situation.
"Good Hunting" : Man I loved this one, right up to before the end. Love the style, love the idea of having a Chinese Witcher :P, loved the development of the story being about the son not really following his dad steps and coming to the city, loved the steampunk twist, but I didn’t like how in the end the entire purpose of all that was just have the protagonist being able of turning the woman into an animal robot of death and destruction, for a bog standard vengeance story against edgy evil colonialists. For example, if they would have developed a love story between them, with the conflict being how their attitudes to the society’s development wasn’t matching (with her growing weaker and bitter in the steampunk city, and him thriving more and more) until they break up, I would have liked it more.
"The Dump" : Ehh. I thought the twist was uninteresting, and it really didn’t do anything special with the plot or the characters. The first I give a thumbs down.
"Shape-Shifters" : Photorealistic style, but a bit less good than other shorts, this one falls several times on the uncanny valley, so I’m not sure of giving it up the thumbs up. At first I thought they were genetically enhanced humans, but it really went literal with the title, with werewolves everywhere. Average tale of military duty, honor, and loss. Not awful, but not really one of the good shorts.
"Helping Hand" : I liked it. It’s about a very specific situation, the entire short is a pair of long scenes, almost. But it’s well done, the important thing is that you get empathy with the protagonist about her terrible situation, her pain and her determination to suffer terrible things to survive. You really feel what she has to do, auuuch.
"Fish Night" : Nice visually, with all the glowing animals in the night, but that’s it. It’s magical realism that goes nowhere.
"Lucky 13" : Great character visuals, I thought at times they were actors, but strangely the ship/environments seemed more like a videogame CGI, it made it feel the visual a bit uneven. The story is… well, forgettable. i get what they were going for, but I didn’t care.
"Zima Blue" : Pleasing 2d art after so much 3d, and it’s combined with a slower, more meditative pace for a good effect. And the end is really surprising. Now that I think back, he first did the cybernetic enhancements because subconsciously he was trying to come back to his origins.
"Blindspot" : An action oriented one. The action itself was all correct, decently thrilling, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the art style it was going for, nor the ‘attitude’.
"Ice Age" : Meh? I didn’t disliked actively or anything, but not one to remember.
"Alternate Histories" : This is too short, and it doesn’t tell anything interesting. It’s a short ‘short film’, which at the same time it divides itself in several micro-tales, so as you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of time for each one. The humor was off, a bit too puerile, and that was the main feature here.
"Secret War" : WW2 soldiers fighting monsters. It doesn’t go very much deeper than that, but it was actually good. The pace, the feeling of the squad being pressured by the higher ups and being too thinned out, the air of rigidity of the army mixed with people getting by as they can, the unfairness of discovering the truth but not being any worth and it would even come back to them, the hopeless of the situation, it was all very well expressed.
