Creator Tim Miller, supervising director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, and designer/director Robert Valley discuss the latest edition of Netflix’s Emmy Award-winning animated short film anthology series that once again delivers a wide selection of funny, frightening, and thoroughly provocative works.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson, director of the second and third Kung-Fu Panda as well as supervising director on Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots, has always had a knack for telling emotional stories. Nelson previously directed Love, Death + Robots Volume 2’s Pop Squad, about a mother attempting to hide her child in an overpopulation crisis, not too dissimilar from her newest short, Spider Rose, where a woman learns to love again through the company of a young alien creature. Nelson’s film releases today, one of 10 shorts / episodes in the all-new Volume 4 of the streamer’s Emmy Award-winning adult animation anthology, Love, Death + Robots. You can find AWN’s breakdown of all 10 shorts here.
While it’s true Nelson seems to have a knack for telling heart-felt stories, Love, Death + Robots creator Tim Miller says it’s not because his friend and production cohort enjoys tender moments.
“I’ve known Jen for a few years now and a lot of people might look at this short and go, ‘Oh, she really loves those sweet moments between characters,’” says Miller, also known for directing Deadpool. “But that’s not why [her work] is the way it is. Jen likes to do that because she knows she’s going to undercut those moments with violent shit later, which will make it that much more difficult to watch. She’s fucked up.”
Nelson replies, “It’s about balance in all things. The cuter it is, the more horrible it is later on.”
Miller adds, “Is that what you tell your therapist?”
Nelson, with a cheeky grin, retorts, “I don’t need therapy. I make animation.”
Check out the Volume 4 trailer:
The new set of shorts kick off with Love, Death & Robots’ first ever music video, Can’t Stop, a recreation of The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ legendary 2003 performance at Slane Castle, Ireland, with band members Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith, and John Frusciante recreated as string-puppets. The short is directed by series co-creator David Fincher, with animation by Blur Studio, the same studio that animated Spider Rose.
“Why David has a fascination with puppets, I can’t say,” says Miller. “Perhaps it’s related to something bad that happened in his childhood. But, right from the start, when I told him I wanted him to do a music video, he goes, ‘Okay. I’m going to do The Red Hot Chili Peppers as puppets.’ There was no hesitation. He said it so fast that I think there’s probably a secret room in the basement of his house filled with puppets.”
But Miller, who almost went with a music video for Tenacious D’s Deth Starr instead, can’t deny that Fincher stayed true to the vision of Love, Death & Robots, which is never to do the same thing twice.
“David’s the master of that format,” admits Miller. “So, why not?”
Volume 4 also features animated miniatures in its episode Close Encounters Of The Mini Kind, which uses tilt-shift photography to illustrate a terror unleashed in a mini alien apocalypse as writer/directors Robert Bisi and Andy Lyon pay tribute to classic sci-fi stories of alien invasion and human stupidity. The animation, done by BUCK, features hundreds of tiny assets, some that tell multiple narratives in one scene. This is one even the production team had to watch a couple times over.
“I didn’t catch this the first time I watched it, but when that one guy gets taken up and they do the anal probe, he releases such power that it powers the starship and that’s what draws in the fleet who want to harness this… let’s just call it ‘anal power’, here on Earth,” says Miller. “It’s all about the details. And, as an animator, I could see these guys giggling as they go, ‘What if the anal probe is flopping around?’ It’s a different exercise in comedy.”
Robert Valley, who directed previous episodes of the anthology like Ice, Zima Blue and Volume 4’s 400 Boys, added, “Yeah, anything anal is A-OK in my book.”
Though BUCK specializes mostly in commercials, their miniature scale animation for Airbnb ads, as well as their previous Love, Death & Robots work using sped-up miniatures on Volume 3’s Night of the Mini Dead, made them the right studio for the job.
“They do such high-quality commercial work that we knew they’d bring something that was really lush,” says Nelson. “They also had an innovative way of approaching the look in the previous season with the zombies. That would have been incredibly expensive to make if it hadn’t been done smartly. And they really did think about every little detail of these shorts. Personally, my favorite part of that story is the little sex shop worker who volunteers to be abducted. We actually refer to him as ‘The Volunteer.’”
Shot with an almost completely opposite viewpoint from Close Encounters Of The Mini Kind is director Valley’s 400 Boys. The short begins by taking viewers through the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic city where warring gangs come together to defeat giants who are demolishing everything in their path. Miller’s script is based on the short story by Marc Laidlaw. The animation, a combination of 2D with some 3D effects, is by Passion Animation.
“In this one, the camera is on the ground as opposed to being up in the air,” says Valley. “I knew it was going to be a challenging undertaking right from the start. I’m a huge fan of Alberto Mielgo, who did the Volume 3 short Jibaro and I’m thinking ‘Fuck, man. I want to do something like Alberto is doing but in 2D.’ I went to our crew, which is not a huge crew, and said, ‘I want to level up this 2D stuff in the same way Alberto is leveling up the 3D. Which means, we have to break the pipeline and put it back together incorrectly a number of times until we start doing something right.’”
And the pipeline demolition added more challenges to something every animator dreads: crowd scenes.
“Rob told me how badly we fucked him on more than one occasion because all these characters had to be drawn,” shares Miller. “Rob’s previous short, Ice had a limited cast. This one was much larger.”
Valley adds, “But it’s what the story needed. You couldn't really shortchange certain things and get the same desired effect. You don’t want to disappoint with this stuff.”
Along with the crowds, another hurdle with 400 Boys was blending in the 3D effects with 2D animated backgrounds and characters.
“Otherwise, it would stand out as being a 3D scene, which would ruin the illusion,” says Valley. “A clever visual effects artist named Martial Coulon accomplished that 3D look using After Effects and a 2D program and it integrates perfectly.”
Meanwhile, Jennifer leaned all the way into the hyper realistic 3DCG for Spider Rose, working from a script inspired by a short story by Bruce Sterling.
“That episode really lived and died on the acting,” says Nelson. “But also, when the woman touches Nosey, this alien creature, we needed to feel the weight of her holding it and her hand crossing through its fur. That tactility had to be there.”
She continues, “Probably one of the big reasons we went for that look was so the audience could feel like they were touching this creature and feel the same emotional connection this woman was feeling. Tim has been friends with Bruce for a long time, and we hesitated on making this one for a while because we wanted to do it right.”
The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur, directed by Miller, is inspired by another short story, this time by Stant Litore. On a space station orbiting Jupiter, decadent aristocrats gather to witness a brutal contest of genetically modified gladiators. Highly trained riders find their place atop hordes of speeding dinosaurs and attempt to annihilate their fellow racers until only one remains.
“I have something like 1,300 short story collections on my kindle and, when I read this one, I just thought, ‘This is the most heavy metal story I’ve ever read,’” remembers Miller. “Some stories like Spider Rose are just fantastic pieces of fiction. But, for The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur, I was as drawn to the story as I was to the visuals, which I knew would be spectacular.”
But animating the actions of multiple riders on top of running dinosaurs atop an orbiting space station made Miller, in his words, “pretty unpopular” with the animation crew.
“It’s a real mechanical mind fuck,” says Miller of the episode, “And, not only that, but Axis in Scotland was originally animating that episode. And they went out of business halfway through, which is when Blur took it over. But, when Axis went down, it wasn’t an orderly crash. We were dropping ninjas in by helicopter to get what we could. But it wasn’t pretty. So, starting just last January, Blur did almost all the animation from scratch. Before Christmas, there was a lot of ‘Tim, you’re going to kill people. This is not a good time for us to do a death march. Do you really want to do this?’ But I had a lot of confidence in the machine we built.”
So, the death march commenced and, fortunately, not one animator dies from exhaustion.
“The show needed a big adrenaline piece and I’m willing to sacrifice almost anything on the altar of Love, Death + Robots,” says Miller, who is also comfortable with being addressed as Lord Farquaad. “It’s for a good cause. And nobody died.”
Nelson adds, “If any animators were killed in the process, it was the poor animators working on the hand animation in How Zeke Got Religion when the cherub goes handsy.”
Miller continues, “We’ve had a lot of bad burns and hard deadlines over the years, but those are the ones I remember, and the ones I’m most proud of. You can’t be a hero unless you’re in the middle of dark times with a difficult task.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
