Since it was released on May 14, the new season of Love, Death and Robots has proved to be a hit with fans. For fans who have already burned through all eight episodes, Netflix has released a new featurette that takes audiences behind the scenes into the vast amount of work required to create the series' stunning animation. Hosted by creator Tim Miller and series director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the short featurette shows how the series lives up to being a truly adult animated anthology with each individual episode being distinctly well-crafted.
The featurette shows how ambitious Love, Death and Robots is in scope and focus. The series tackles some headier, adult themes that are far too often missing in animation. As Visual Effects Supervisor Jerome Denjean astutely points out, “when we say adult animation, it's not necessarily very graphic. It deals with themes that will resonate with you as an adult.” Miller describes these different themes and stories as being a “creative jam session from artists from around the world” with “new voices.”
That meant looking to Nelson, who brought a breadth of experience from working on previous Oscar-nominated projects for DreamWorks. This new project was certainly a departure from her previous work, as the series far more graphic and intense than the Kung Fu Panda films Nelson directed. “As a supervising director, you’re sort of like this umbrella over all these other directors and their studios that are making these episodes,” Nelson says. “[You got to] get their personal styles to an amazing level for the show. The hallmark of the show is the variety.”
The featurette also highlights the short Life Hutch which stars Michael B. Jordan as he is trapped on a planet with a murderous robot that combines live-action with CGI. As for which is which, the technology is starting to get good enough that Nelson challenges viewers to “figure out which ones were really him and which ones were the CG version of him.”
Nelson also breaks down the short she directed, Pop Squad, which is based on a story by Paolo Bacigalupi that shows what happens if people could live forever though raising children was outlawed. “I hope that it makes people examine what gives life meaning. It’s not necessarily the length of time, it’s about how you experience it and what you might be able to give,” Nelson says.
The first two seasons of Love, Death and Robots are available on Netflix now. Check out the behind-the-scenes featurette below.