I think the only real commonality between the episodes (other than that they’re sci-fi, and that there’s robots) is CATS!
Our feline overlords are depicted in a number of the episodes, and, in a twist of irony, are often portrayed as our feline overlords.
I loved Three Robots and Good Hunting and liked many of the others.
A cute Easter egg in Helping Hand is that she’s servicing satellite LV-426, which is the planet in Alien, and the short demonstrates that movie’s tagline.
These are the ones I’ve seen so far, in this order. I’m definitely enjoying the series, even if I find some of the story elements problematic.
I think When the Yoghurt Took Over is my favourite so far.
[Moderating]
Huh, hadn’t I already merged these threads? Well, I have now.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Heavy Metal (the magazine). I finished watching The Dump last night, but the overall themes of over the top violence, sex and sci-fi is exactly the way I remember the magazine being like in the late 80s. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if RanXerox showed up at some point.
There’s also a scene where she screams, and nobody can hear it.
My thinking is that they were both alive at first, but she died before him. Maybe she rejected the simulation entirely after a while. We don’t know how many times he’d been looped through the scenario before he woke up. We don’t even know if that was the **first time **she let him wake up.
I liked the series overall. Some of it was a little too cliche, yeah, and the gratuitous nudity was pretty eye-rollingly silly. None of the twists made me gasp in shock, but several of them had me nodding in appreciation. For example:
The kid getting killed in Fish Night.
It’s the kind of thing you can do in short story anthologies because you don’t have to worry about viewer investment. I like that. I hope Netflix does more stuff like this in the future.
Seen the rest now. Really liked* Lucky 13* a lot, and* Zima Blue* felt the most, I don’t know - “sci-fi anthology-y” of the lot.
That’s what I meant by “demonstrates the movie’s tagline”, but maybe that was a little too oblique.
Saw them all and I was very impressed with some of the animation, but none of the episodes were particularly good in my opinion.
I guess I should say, none of them were excellent. Some were good, some were pretty good, and a few were kind of bad. I was more impressed with the animation than any script.
I won’t remember much about this show in a few months.
On the dope, no one can hear you whoosh.
Oh, I forgot to add -* Fish Night* went from my absolute favourite (Anomalocaris! Trilobites! ) to my least favourite in the last 30 seconds. What a pointless ending (which might have been the writer’s point, but fuck that noise)
Fish Night is the only one I stopped watching.
No one is going to love all of them, which is the point. They were all well done. I could do without the bloody bits of Shape Shifter and Witness, but they were still nicely animated.
I loved Three Robots. I don’t have an iPhone, so I don’t know what Siri sounds like, but the female voice was a ringer for the computer voice on the Mission Log podcast.
And almost none of them went on too long.
Fish Night was definitely my least favorite, since the premise was pulled out of their asses, and ghosts around don’t make you a ghost.
No one mentioned Sucker of Souls. I liked it because it was set in Hong Kong and had a nice steampunk vibe which none of the other episodes had.
I guess the salesmen were also supposed to be nearly extinct, not much future in travelling sales, or something.
It wasn’t Sucker of Souls. It was Good Hunting.
It was one I was conflicted by:
Yay for alternative steampunk/clockpunk world, yay for jiuweihu, yay for such an explicitly anti-colonialist story (contrast it with Suit’s pro-colonialism jingoism), yay for some beautiful animation.
Boo for the repeated sex worker rape aspects of the storyline.
Good take. I would have loved it if it ended with both the salesmen joining the other extinct creatures, floating naked and liberated through the air. Instead of the shitty ending we got.
I was also conflicted by this one. Both for the reasons you mentioned, and there wasn’t really much story there, just an exercise in worldbuilding. No character development, no real conflict or story arc (except for the initial set piece), not really much of a twist to save it in the end.
Just guy helps a magical fox-turned-girl-turned-robot turn into a fox-robot-assassin. Fin.
Whoops about the name. There wasn’t a lot of character development in most of these stories. I have a book of short short sf stories, these remind me a lot of them.
Yeah…Good Hunting was my favourite other than this aspect. Especially, we didn’t need to see her pussy when she was being mutilated.
Similarly, the human sacrifice in The Secret War…which didn’t have enough in the way of good features to make up for it. That POS was the only irredemable episode in the series. As problematic as the sexual aspects of Good Hunting or The Witness were, the episodes would have been great with that problem fixed. Interesting stories, great animation, fascinating settings. Secret War…OK, but not great story, blah animation, boring as hell setting.