‘Love, Death & Robots’: The Best Episodes of Netflix’s Animated Series (2024)

10. “Lucky 13”

Voiceover narration is always a tricky prospect in one of these shorts. Often working from a foundation of short fiction, it’s easy to see why these adaptations would want to preserve some of that in the final product. “Lucky 13” is brimming with so many other exacting technical achievements that you hardly need those spoken explanations to fill in any gaps. There’s a care and depth in what Samira Wiley brings to her pilot character (not to mention Daisuke Tsuji, too) that elevates “Lucky 13” from being a pure exercise. It also benefits from just a touch of the metaphysical, bringing in a dash of the unexpected for even inhabitants of this future world filled with planet evacuations and deadly fighter pilot missions.

9. “Suits”

“Suits” is assembled like one of the outfitted rigs that its main characters take into battle. Take a rural farm landscape, a ‘90s action thriller spirit, and a portal to another dimension, and when you put them all together, you get one of the collection’s most purely entertaining shorts. Even in the compressed timeframe, with so much action to get through, the fact that Franck Balson and the Blur Studios team find quick, efficient ways to differentiate the members of this ad hoc squadron (and tap into a sympathy for the loved ones they leave behind) is no easy feat. It’s also one of the rare installments in this collection to hit the title trifecta in three different meaningful ways, all up until the final reframing parting shot.

8. “Helping Hand”

Violence is baked into the DNA of “Love, Death & Robots.” A lot of it feels shoehorned in, a few extra streams of blood to really hammer home how serious everything can be. “Helping Hand” is one of the perfect examples of how inner turmoil is almost always more compelling. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the vast emptiness of space is one of universal terrors Director John Yeo, leading a team of animators at Axis Studios, gives you an onboard view of what it’s like to careen away from salvation. By the time our on-screen astronaut has to literally sacrifice an appendage to generate enough thrust to float back to their ship, “Helping Hand” has synthesized all that fear and pain into a space story that seems eerily plausible on a number of different levels.

7. “Jibaro”

Dipping its toes into the physical and metaphorical waters of medieval mythology, “Jibaro” is a staggeringly visceral story in ways that don’t necessarily center on bloodshed. Through the eyes of deaf knight Jibaro, we see a group encounter a mysterious Golden Woman of the lake. Her siren song drives the men of Jibaro’s cohort to madness, but he is spared. Writer/Director Alberto Mielgo paints an incredibly efficient portrait of the vengeance and violence inherently in so many of the stories of Middle Ages lore. Greed and desire feel as baked into the DNA of this tiny forest paradise as the trees themselves. The Pinkman.tv animation team blends an incredibly effective photorealistic approach with just enough haziness to help take this imagined world from nightmare to dream to back again.

6. “Zima Blue”

With so many of these shorts aiming for a specific level of hyperrealism, seeing one of these shorts embrace a more fluid, stylized animation approach feels like a breath of fresh air. Robert Valley’s art deco-tinged look at the future — also gorgeously realized in the Season 2 installment “Ice” — converges around a single fictional artist of the future. Evolving in a series of murals with increasingly impossible dimensions, the slow reveal of the painter’s true identity is the greatest “Zima Blue” reveal. The ability to transform something so banal into something this contemplative and creatively ambitious marks the best of what “Love, Death & Robots” has to offer. All credit due also to Kevin Michael Richardson, who manages to bring a distinct emotional core to Zima himself.

5. “Life Hutch”

Michael B. Jordan staring at a mangled hand while trying to say silent enough to avoid detection by a sentient killing machine: You don’t need much more than that to pull off an effective claustrophobic thriller like this one. Jordan has such an expressive face — it’s a testament to the Blur team led by director Alex Beaty that they’re able to translate that to this animated pressure-cooker, featuring a downed pilot trying to survive the very building meant to keep him safe. But it’s more than just “Panic Room” in space (fitting, given the show’s Fincher backing). There’s a sense of spatial geography here that, when combined with some sound trickery and an unexpected cat joke, really sell this as a focused battle of wits. It’s a bit of a misleading statement with how much detail there still is inside what could easily be a dim, featureless interior, but “Life Hutch” is one of the prime examples that less can absolutely be more in the world of “Love, Death & Robots.”

4. “Beyond the Aquila Rift”

Another filmmaking team with work appearing in both seasons, Léon Bérelle, Dominique Boidin, Rémi Kozyra, and Maxime Luère certainly leave an impression with their first entry. What begins as a sensual post-space hibernation encounter gradually clues the audience into the idea that things on board this ship might not be as they seem. The story works on a “reconnecting with an old flame” level that it’s all the more jarring when some fantasy alarm bells really start going off. To the extent that a handful of frames can define an entire piece of work, any short with the ending reveal here has to be near the top of this list. It’s as easy for any viewer to give the same “How bad can it really be?” reaction that Thom has when asked to see the “real” interior of the ship. But that red-tangled monstrosity — complete with the lifeless corpses of the rest of Thom’s crew — is certainly the most haunting single image in the entire show’s run so far.

3. “The Secret War”

So much of this show is dependent on scale. There’s a “pack the frame” approach that can sometimes make the end result feel overstuffed, but overwhelming is absolutely the goal in this short from István Zorkóczy and Digic Pictures. It’s survival stripped down to its rawest form, one that also runs through “Suits” and “The Tall Grass” and the other “Love, Death & Robots” chapters that feature some kind of zombie-like figure. “The Secret War” takes just enough time to acknowledge where these ravenous hoards come from: they’re a byproduct of an act of hubris, a theme that applies just as well for many of the robot stories, too. When “The Secret War” ends, against a lush, snow-drenched natural backdrop, it’s not with triumph. The final standoff and the epilogue carpet-bombing aren’t delivered with a sense that this destruction is especially fulfilling. The short almost feels as defeated as Zakharov. That sense of exhaustion ends up being an effective series counterbalance.

2. “Bad Travelling”

“Explorers stumbling on a nefarious force” has become something of a “Love, Death + Robots” subgenre. None of other episodes have tackled the tricky group dynamics and true sense of danger quite like this seafaring adventure. Centered on a crew thrown into disarray when a mammoth crablike alien takes up residence in the hull and demands sacrificial offerings, what unspools from there is an expertly paced and plotted bit of nastiness. With the ominous dim lighting you’d expect from a Fincher-directed project, this still has a tremendous amount of clarity in how it lays out each new dread-inducing detail. Steady and surprising all at once, it’s another fruitful pairing for Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker, giving the Blur Studio team the perfect canvas to bring Neal Asher’s “Jable Sharks” world to life.

1. “The Drowned Giant”

That Season 2 of “Love, Death & Robots” ends with a sigh and not an explosion is a welcome twist. That it comes in a short directed by Miller is doubly surprising. All the cacophony of twisting naked bodies and slit throats and mechanized life forms culminates in a sober, existential response to a single oddity: a mammoth, barn-sized human washed up on the shore of a coastal town.

Tapping into J.G. Ballard’s story, “The Drowned Giant” forges its own visual ideas while still feeling more literary than pretty much any of the others that come before it. As we pointed out in our Season 2 review, it’s also striking in how it presents a distinct idea of death within this series. It’s one that doesn’t come at the end of an enemy’s weapon. It just….happens. Swapping out instantaneous annihilation for the tragedy of slow decay makes for “Love, Death & Robots” most profound idea. Miller can’t help but squeeze one gag in near the end that would be right at home in a Deadpool movie. But overall, this stands as proof that for the show, one of its notable directors, and the medium overall, cutting away some of the flashy frills can reveal some beautiful, patient storytelling underneath.