Love Death & Robots Season 3 is Mental. I’m nigh on certain you don’t know this about me. But, during my first year of college, Auto-Cad was the new hot hotness. Now, auto-cad to all the 12-year olds out there reading this blog… is like, uh, caveman Pixar?
It was the first software solutions for the masses to allow users to do rudimentary design and animations. I was CERTAIN this was my future. Especially after a near miss on attending Maryland’s Institute of Art. This would be my vow of artisanal poverty.
So, yeah – I am an enormous Animation fan. Anime (Akira, Appleseed), Comic books (Image: Spawn, anything Todd McFarlane), animated movies of all types – shapes – colors. And when Love Death & Robots came out with season 1, I was all over that like white on rice. It was CRAZY, brilliant, and the best kind of adult oriented animation. For too long the art had been stolen by the 4-year olds of the planet, and Love Death & Robots absconded the art back again. But when Season 2 came out, I was not a fan. Yes, it was technical brilliance… but nothing just snapped my neck and said, LOOK AT ME. But that all changed again with Season 3.
The season takes us back to Season 1, it takes us to distant planets, it takes us to the sea and killer crab creatures… in a word, it’ll blow your mind. There isn’t anything here that isn’t heart-stoppingly beautiful. There isn’t anything here that won’t make you just stare agog.
Take for example the final episode of the season – Jibaro. Personally? I think it is the single best 15 minutes of animation ever crafted. Yeah, that’s a super high – SUPER HIGH bar. But yeah… I laid that gauntlet down. Feel free to take a run at it, and give me a better 15.
The episode follows a deaf conquistador… (YES. I KNOW… AMAZINGLY DIFFERENT SETUP) and the sound design follows to boot. Soon, a djinn of the lake – a evil minion that hordes gold, a siren luring men to their depths below the depths of the water – arrives.
A still image doesn’t capture her. She is movement, anger, angst, and passion. She is spinning, teacupping, dervishing chaos. Spiraling jewels. Flashes of gold, and wanton looks, eyelashes, and painted flashes of gold. She consumes the men that hear her shrieks. The conquistadors go mad with blood lust and begin murdering each other as they crash and splash to their dooms beneath the water… but our deaf hero? He can’t hear a thing. He’s immune. Come on. So good. And, as such, he has unwittingly disarmed our siren… called her bluff, and stolen her gold. But her blood unleashed in the water gives him one last gift. It heals him. He is able to hear! The exploding chaos of blood splashing through the water is his salvation! But when she climbs back out of the water – he can hear her, and she ravages his mind, gets her revenge.
Literally one of the best strings of animations ever.
The really great thing? There are so many good episodes in this season… some funny, some sad, some horrible, but all amazing… that I don’t know which ones to tell you about. But remember, these aren’t cartoons. These are animations with very violent, very adult themes. So, let’s not invite the kids, okay? Great.
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Interested in some of my plotter designs? I recently bought a plotter (or was given one for Christmas?) and I have been playing quite a bit with Blender in order to export line drawings that are reproduce-able by my plotter. Here have two:
I even experimented with plotting images and then animating them? But maybe that’ll be a story for another day.
Edited by: CY
