Yes, there is a MrBeast cameo in an episode of Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots Volume 4. The YouTube personality whose videos often follow hapless contestants competing in difficult or ridiculous challenges appears in “The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur” as the announcer for a gladiator fight set within the wheel of a space station, whose wealthy guests watch as human warriors violently battle each other while riding on the backs of stampeding Triceratops. It honestly works: The casting of an online personality, as well as a few other tricks Volume 4 has up its sleeve, is emblematic of an anthology show that is tailor-made for the short-form streaming era, where stories are compact and satisfying and the next one is just a scroll away.
Six years after it premiered, Love, Death and Robots remains one of the last holdouts of Netflix’s “we’ll just let our artists do whatever they want” era, a broad showcase of genres, storytelling concepts, and animation styles that allows its writers, animators, and voice actors room to play in a worlds-spanning sandbox. So, assessing any new season is less of a question of whether or not the show as a whole is any “good,” and more a study of what makes something worth watching. That said, perusing the 10 shorts of Volume 4 is a rewarding way to spend an afternoon.
Like any anthology series, there are standouts among the more skippable fare. This season begins with a hilariously strange David Fincher-directed Red Hot Chili Peppers music video starring the members of the band as caricatured string puppet versions of themselves singing a live recording of their seminal banger “Can’t Stop.” Robert Valley (whose Volume 1 episode “Zima Blue” remains the gold standard for what a show like this can accomplish) returns with “400 Boys,” a thrilling gangland odyssey set in a post apocalyptic city where rival “teams” join forces to defeat a gang of giant babies, animated with Valley’s signature stylized, angular flair.
Later comes the decidedly Hellboy-inflected “How Zeke Got Religion,” a cosmic-horror short set aboard a World War II bomber that must blow up a French church before a group of Nazi occultists can raise a demonic fallen angel. The aforementioned “Tyrannosaur” is a marvel of lifelike CGI set against a fantastical background, its central storyline moving in spite of its short length. The season closes with “For He Can Creep,” about a cat battling Satan for an insane poet’s immortal soul, with gorgeous animation that looks like an etching come to life.
It’s difficult to gauge exactly how successful a show like this is, given there’s no follow-through on any of the stories introduced in these shorts, and not a lot of room for much worldbuilding or lore. Certain episodes have broken through to wider audiences – a few years back, it seemed every makeup artist with an online platform was recreating the distinctive glittery look of the river siren from Volume 3 episode “Jibaro.” But what they lose in sheer mass they gain back in variety, opportunity, and an appeal to an array of tastes: Whether you’ll enjoy prolific sci-fi author John Scalzi’s two funny contributions to Volume 4, “The Other Large Thing” and “Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners,” will depend on your bandwidth for goofy genre comedy.
A short film has the time to be perfected frame-by-frame that a feature doesn’t. A 5-minute story has a limited amount of space to get its ideas across, shaving off anything extraneous so that the remainder is, ideally, the purest essence of the thing. There’s a whole universe and mythology forming the backbone for the deep-space love story between a cyborg and her alien pet in “Spider Rose,” for example; we only get a short glimpse at all of that, but the main story is still impactful regardless. Love, Death and Robots continues to make good on that promise four seasons in. It’s ideal for a class of viewers beset by apps, texts, and Tiktok, yes, but if this is the future of what we must begrudgingly call “content” – short, digestible, daring – we could do a lot worse.
