I think some of you who have been readers since the beginning of my writer’s journey will remember one of my first articles which covered Volume 2 of Love Death + Robots. And now just a year later, Volume 3 has finally been released. Like the volume before it, Volume 3 comes complete with 9 new shorts, all in different styles of animation, varied stories and arrays of different themes. So let’s get to it!
We start off with a nice surprise which I didn’t think Netflix would have the balls to do, with a continuation of the Three Robots story in Three Robots: Exit Strategies! In this short we see everyone’s favourite robotic trio try to understand humans and their survival endgames of the apocalypse in the most meta way possible. A lot of digs at doomsday preppers and billionaires with way too much money, and of course spaceships going to Mars (with cats – no Elon to be seen here folks). It’s great mockery and social commentary that feels appropriate to the bots themselves as well as their overall setting.
Bad Traveling is something adjacent to a Pirates of the Caribbean tale mixed with something Lovecraftian/Cronenbergian. It’s a chilling, disturbing story that wows you with its hyper realistic visuals and some superbly done voice acting. Each of the crew members in this story being fed one by one to a supersized crab monster thing that also puppets dead corpses to speak? Nightmare Fuel. And with an ending that sees the captain not go down with his ship and escape a grizzly death, we are left yearning for more.
The Very Pulse of the Machine is one of the more psychedelic-slash-confusing episodes, nonetheless an intriguing one at that.
Night of the Mini-Dead is a novelty episode that descends into mini chaos as we see a very high-pitched, sped-up, micro view of a global scale apocalypse. It’s hilarious and short, and the pitchy shouting and screaming of tiny people fighting tiny zombies!
Kill Team Kill looks like it came from Adult Swim with its cartoon look and over-the-top gore.
Love Death + Robots Volume 3 (2022)
Swarm starts off being this peaceful episode about unity and solving humanity’s problems by creating a hive, but ends up having such a nightmarish conclusion.
Mason’s Rats is basically if Ratatouille was a war story with rats vs. a farmer.
In Vaulted Halls Entombed is very centred around mystery and horror and well, you know I’m a sucker for horror so there isn’t much left for me to say about it!
Jibaro is the final episode, and ironically, one with no dialogue, despite its theme being about sound. Its definitely one of the more experimental episodes and the animation, characters and story is very symbolic and interesting.
Overall, I got through this volume fairly quickly and it satisfied my hunger for new Netflix content before the bigger releases. It’s insanely graphic and dark, but also heartfelt, comedic and unexpected. With talent like David Fincher, Tim Miller and many others, you can see Netflix took pride in crafting each episode.
