Love, Death and Robots will be returning to Netflix this month after year-long hiatus. The anthology series showcases individual episodes telling their own short stories in around 15 minutes. Despite that not being a lot of time, each tiny episode takes the viewer on a journey that could last ages, capturing your heart in a single moment and making one feel things that you might have needed 90 minutes for in a movie theater. The plots are creative, and the animation style may be different with every episode. Meaning viewers could be watching something stylized like Blade Runner one minute and then something that looks like claymation in the next. Each story has its own director and cast while adapted from a different short story, making everything you get truly individual.
But while that’s normally true, Netflix recently released a few film stills in anticipation of the May 20th release date, and one of them shows a robot from the very first episode. The teaser trailer also shows some familiar imagery from the season 2 episode “The Drowned Giant.” So it looks like the series may be trying to involve some familiarity in this new season. But the only thing we can know for sure is to expect the unexpected. Every Love, Death and Robots episode is a turn into a new maze, and every 15 minutes brings a new Minotaur into the labyrinth.
Season 3's Teaser Trailer
The teaser trailer is meant to get you excited. And it works. As of 3 weeks ago, Netflix hadn’t released much information on the new season, but the teaser gave us a first look at what could be in season 3. According to the six film stills they released, it looks like the new season will feature a mix of 2D and 3D animation like the last two seasons did. It’s also likely that Blur Studio, the primary workhorse for the series, will be returning for another digital penciling. Still, here's what to expect from season 3.
What was known for sure was that some main producers would be back, including Tim Miller (Deadpool), who works on adapting most of the short stories the series sources. It’s also likely that David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Gone Girl) will stay on as a producer as he is also set to direct. Jennifer Yuh (Kung Fu Panda 1, 2, and 3) will probably be back to help with visual effects because of her celebrated success with the last season. Miller has confirmed that John Scalzi will return to write. His story was the inspiration for the first episode entitled “Three Robots.” Which we knew would be returning due to the film stills. But hopefully, he’ll be back with a new creative take on the characters.
Having those three scampy robots back also means that Josh Brener, Chris Parnell, and Gary Anthony Williams will be returning to voice them. Josh Brener plays K-VRC, the tiny orange robot we saw in the still. Gary Anthony Williams plays XBOT 4000, the tall, walking robot most often bearing the cat on his shoulder. And Chris Parnell will voice the cat. The third actual robot, named 11-45-G, is voiced by a computer program and goes uncredited on the cast list. We’ll see if the show’s creators regret that decision come the real robot apocalypse. It’s unclear whether Philip Gelatt, who adapted the script for that episode, will return, but it seems like the right move for the showrunners to have him back.
Season 3's Official Trailer
The official trailer dropped on May 9th. It's twice as intense and shows much more of what we can expect from the new season. The snippets of brief text during the video alert us to nine new episodes, which means nine new stories and nine new aesthetics. The trailer opens on the beautiful, familiar, and in this case, slightly eerie first notes of Beethoven's "Für Elise" and then commences to give us the titles and little 10-second flashes of all nine episodes. It looks like each one is filled with incredible suspense and that sense of enigmatic wonder that we've come to expect from the show while running the gamut of genres from kaiju horror to futuristic comedy.
The titles of the episodes are as follows: "Bad Traveling," which seems to have sea monsters galore; "The Very Pulse of the Machine," which from the title and a bit of dialogue might be about machine consciousness; "In Vaulted Halls Entombed" looks like the classic story of soldiers getting in over their heads; "Jibaro," from which all we see is a screaming woman drenched in jewelry; "Swarm," about the perfect organic system; "Mason's Rats," wherein rats have learned to militarize themselves; "Three Robots: Exit Strategies," likely a sequel to Scalzi's first tale; "Kill Team Kill" which asks, "Should we shoot it?" and answers, "Heck yes;" and "Night of the Mini Dead," which probably features a bunch of miniaturized zombies.
All in all, it seems like a big season ahead of us, and a bunch of worthy stories prepared for our entertainment.