Netflix's Emmy Award-winning anthology "Love, Death + Robots" kicks off Volume 4 on May 15, 2025, with ten striking animated shorts that include adaptations of wildly imaginative stories featuring gladiatorial dinosaurs, an alien invasion on a miniature scale, a vengeful cyberpunk warrior, and an English priest conversing with an alien.
We connected with the series co-creator and co-executive producer Tim Miller ("Deadpool," "Terminator: Dark Fate") and supervising director Jennifer Yuh Nelson ("Kung Fu Panda 2" and "Kung Fu Panda 3") to get their thoughts and reactions to the new season's four main science fiction episodes: "Close Encounters of the Mini Kind;" "Golgotha;" "Spider Rose;" and "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur" on the eve of the show's release.
Here’s what the star pair had to say about these evocative entries!
"Close Encounters of the Mini Kind"
- Directed by: Robert Bisi and Andy Lyon
- Logline: A speed-run tilt-shift perspective on a classic alien invasion that ends with a hilarious bang that’s barely a whimper.
Tim Miller: The season before we did "Night of the Mini Dead" and we had such a good time doing it. It was very popular and it makes us laugh every time. So we wanted to revisit it and work our way through all the big disaster-type movies that I loved so much growing up. The next one up, of course, was a space invasion. If we're lucky, we’ll get to do some others. It seemed like the right field to till for humor.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson: It's a great way to connect with the BUCK guys because they had directed the previous season's episode. It was allowing them to play again and just calling them up and saying, "Hey, do you want to do another one? Let's just rewind and do it again a different way." They were so game for it. They're so talented, and it was fun to get them back in it.
"Golgotha"
- Directed by: Tim Miller
- Logline: This live-action entry presents a humble priest serving as a beachfront emissary to a tentacled alien searching for his species’ aquatic savior on Earth.
Tim Miller: From a story perspective, you rarely find something that is such a complete beginning, middle, and end, and a perfect arc in so short of a time frame. It's really efficient from a storytelling standpoint, and it's funny. The ludicrousness of the idea is pretty amazing. I'm not religious at all, so it appeals to me. And in the insanity of general religion, why not a dolphin Jesus? We drove up the coast and shot it in Malibu over two days. It was great. Easy to do, and I knew it would work because it was just all there in the story.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson: It was a really fun time. We got to hang out on the beach. We loved the story because it was so succinct and clear, but also it was different. I think the power of this show is that all of the stories are very different. We were trying to find something that would stand out in its own way, and the just seemed like a perfect fit.
"Spider Rose"
- Directed by: Jennifer Yuh Nelson
- Logline: Spawned from cyberpunk master Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," a Mechanist mourning her husband’s death is gifted a strange new pet as she settles a score with a Shaper.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson: The reason why I loved it was because of the emotion and the connection between the two. That this creature could bond so emotionally with its host and to show that relationship so quickly over 14 minutes and designing this cute little thing.
But what I really liked in the ending was seeing that moment of conflict in this creature's face. Like when you have a pet and if it's under dire duress and it has to eat its owner, like a cat has to eat its little old lady owner, they're still animals at the core, so they've gotta do what they've gotta do. So when you look at Nosey and it's looking at her at that moment, and its little nose starts snarling up, and it's just going to let itself go, I love that piece of animation so much. It's my favorite shot.
Tim Miller: I've always loved the whole story. I love that this woman is dealing with grief and she's crawled off into this galactic hole to deal with her loss. I thought it was a beautiful story. I love the whole universe that Bruce Sterling created here. I did one called "Swarm." Jennifer did "Spider Rose." And there's two other stories that he wrote as warm-ups for his novel "Schismatrix," which is one of my favorites of all time.
It's really a conflict between two directions that humanity might go. One is genetically modified humans, and the other is cybernetically modified humans. It's the Shapers and the Mechanists. I told one side of the story, the Shapers, and Jennifer is telling the other side of the story with the Mechanists.
"The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur"
- Directed by: Tim Miller
- Logline: Genetically altered humans ride engineered dinosaurs in a savage race staged for the elite on a ring-like space station orbiting Jupiter.
Tim Miller: It's the most "Heavy Metal" story I think I've ever read. I thought it would be perfect for Zack Snyder because he wanted to direct a "Love, Death and Robots" episode, and when he couldn’t because he was too busy, Jennifer and Victoria convinced me to do it. It's dinosaurs in space! You say the longline, and people started to smile. It's so ridiculous. I tried to take it seriously, though, and I think I really captured this sort of "Ben-Hur" chariot race with just enough story to hang it on to make it somewhat emotional.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson: I'm glad you chose that one, Tim. You made it live.
Also executive produced by acclaimed director David Fincher, "Love, Death + Robots" Vol. 4 streams exclusively on Netflix starting May 15, 2025.
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