If, like me, you've no interest in Black Mirror season 7 due to the rapidly-dropping quality of the last few seasons, then Netflix has something else for you: Love, Death + Robots Volume 4 finally has a release date after three years, and it's startlingly soon.
The new batch of episodes of Love, Death + Robots will hit Netflix on Thursday, May 15. That gives you time to rewatch the last three seasons (or is that Volumes?) of the series before it returns... and gives Black Mirror some time to breathe before its rival returns. But it's much sooner than I'd expected!
The trailer for Volume 4 shows some repeated elements from past seasons, like the miniatures-style animation of the episode featured in the header image of this article, which we've already seen in Volume 3's Night of the Mini Dead. We also see an anthropomorphic washing machine, which is reminiscent of Volume 2's Automated Customer Service.
But there's a lot of novel stuff in the trailer too. My eyes were immediately drawn to the dinosaur gladiator-style deathmatch but there's also talking cats, rock band marionettes, combat against giant babies and, in a big surprise, (what looks like) a live action story.
For those of you who haven't heard of Love, Death + Robots, an understandable fact since the series remains seriously underrated, it's an animated anthology series that's a lot more 'hard' sci-fi than Black Mirror — think aliens, cyberpunk, monsters and the like. While BM tries to reflect on modern society, LDR is more broadly about humanity and human nature.
Episodes are pretty short, between three and twenty minutes, and they all deal with a story loosely surrounding love, death or robots. Funny, that!
What's great about LDR is that each episode was made by a different animation studio, so you get wildly different shorts both in terms of story and style. You might go from a cartoonish yarn to an anime to a realistic-looking tale all in the course of half an hour.
From a narrative perspective, you also get a lot more variety in LDR than Black Mirror, with the latter often accused of being overly 'doom-and-gloom'. Some LDR episodes may be cynical but others are funny, poignant or action-oriented with little actual story at all.
With 10 episodes, this is the second-longest Volume so far, after the first with 18. The second and third had 8 and 9, which seemed like a downgrade on Netflix's part, so it's good to see that we're getting more this time around.
We have yet to see an official episode list so we don't know who's making episodes or providing voices (there's often more a focus on actual voice talent rather than stunt casting in Love, Death + Robots compared to Black Mirror, but some known names have voiced roles or directed episodes in the past). It's unclear if we'll hear more before the episode's release, but we'll update you if we do.
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