Love, Death & Robots’ team wants more adult American animation — and anime is helping
Netflix’s anthology seriesLove, Death & Robots returned for a third installment on May 20 in all its edgy, red-band glory. It’s like nothing else in animation right now: Each episode tells a different, self-contained story ranging in tone from crass comedy to dark drama. None of the shorts shy away from gritty, hardcore elements: blood and guts, nudity and sex, horror and horniess galore. And unlike other staples of adult animation, like Big Mouth or Family Guy, Love, Death & Robots is a genre spectacle, adapting various science fiction and fantasy stories.
Co-creator Tim Miller says he hand-picks the stories from the vast collection of short-fiction anthologies on his Kindle. Miller (director of Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate) and co-creator David Fincher (director of Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, and much more) launched the anthology series in 2019, picking a wide variety of directors and studios to work on the shorts. One of those directors happened to be former DreamWorks director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3), who directed season 2’s LDR short “Pop Squad” and season 3’s “Kill Team Kill.” She also serves as an executive producer this season. It might seem strange that the director of Kung Fu Panda 2 pivoted to helping manage a hardcore, edgy anthology, but Nelson tells us that moving into adult animation came completely naturally to her.
“My natural sensibility is very dark, much more adult animation,” Nelson explains. “I grew up on anime. And so for me, animation is not supposed to be just a child’s medium. But that’s been what it’s been mainly in the U.S., especially if you’re going for big-budget world-building stories. When a chance like this comes along, where I can finally stretch into what I
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