Love, Death + Robots [c/o Netflix] — Love, Death + Robots - 400 Boys | Director: Robert Valley | Studio: Passion Pictures

‘Love, Death + Robots’ Vol. 4: More Adventures in Mind-Expanding Sci-Fi

May 14, 2025

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

***This article was written for the May/June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350)***

Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots — the five-time Emmy-winning animated anthology series that showcases an unrestricted flow of mature, mind-massaging sci-fi, fantasy and horror shorts — has returned for a fourth season of raw imagination. This modern heir apparent to the 1981 movie Heavy Metal is an experimental kitchen constantly cooking up every conceivable flavor in the art of animation. Created and executive produced by Tim Miller and David Fincher, with Jennifer Yuh Nelson aboard as supervising director, Love, Death + Robots is a fever dream of extraordinary stories adapted by a team of unrivaled talent that delivers one gem after another.

Chatting with Miller, Nelson and famed animator Robert Valley, one is immediately reminded of how, since 2019, this show has evolved into a signature brand of delightfully demented, hardcore animated outings:

Animation Magazine: Love, Death + Robots is widely embraced by legions of fans and animation enthusiasts. How have you kept steady hands on the creative wheel to keep Love, Death + Robots on course through these four seasons and what was your core vision?

Miller: I wanted to do a Heavy Metal show because it influenced me heavily as a kid, because I wanted to be an animator, but I didn’t want to animate Yogi Bear on Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Heavy Metal gave me hope that you could find a place in animation that could tell adult stories with adult themes. It was Heavy Metal and Fritz the Cat and midnight screenings at the mall with my friends, and it was amazing. So I’m trying to reinvent that. Fincher and I pitched with Kevin Eastman, who owned Heavy Metal magazine, a hundred versions of this show with Guillermo del Toro and Jim Cameron and Zack Snyder. I was a drag on the ticket, but I was there, and we just couldn’t sell it. Eventually, Fincher said, “F— it, let’s just do it on Netflix and call it something else,” and Love, Death + Robots was born.

Jennifer directed the unsettling sci-fi episode Spider Rose, which has a distinctly cyberpunk-meets-space opera flair. Its gruesome ending was changed from Bruce Sterling’s 1982 short story that it was based on. How was that decision made?

Miller: I’m a bit slavish to the original, as Jen and Robert will tell you. I’m almost always fighting for what was the author’s original intent. Which doesn’t mean it’s not better the other way; it’s just harder for me to unstick it.

Nelson: We do try to be true to the short story. I think that’s one of the guiding principles of the show and why the stories are so good, because they’re based on really great stories. It wasn’t a light thing to do to change the ending. I actually did do the other version at some point, and it was a hard swap. I think something changes when you visualize it. When you write it, it’s a little bit more on your mind. When you see it, it’s far more of a thing. A similar thing we did on Pop Squad [in Volume 2]. We had kids being killed multiple times, and you can’t show that. So we had to figure how to do things in a way that reads visually. In this particular one, you’re supposed to, over 12 minutes, empathize with something and then watch someone kill it on screen and eat it! And that was a really hard bridge to cross. I felt it was a way you could get my favorite shot in the short when you see the conflict on Nosey’s face when he’s about to do what he’s going to do. I felt I was still in the Love, Death + Robots world in that you don’t have happy things, but it kept it from being something so horrific that people would say, “Nope.”

Valley: I think I’m getting ready to eat my son. I’m getting to that point. He’s 14.

Miller: That’s probably the age when they taste best.

Robert, the striking segment you directed is 400 Boys. It’s a postapocalyptic gangland tale based on Half-Life creator Marc Laidlaw’s 1983 short story in Omni magazine. It feels a bit like A Clockwork Orange with giant babies and with stylistic and thematic nods to The Warriors. Did Walter Hill’s 1979 classic also influence this piece?

Valley: Yeah, I am totally a fan of that film. I’ve seen it before all these streaming platforms, when they’d show it on TV occasionally, and I always made time to watch it. So I read the short story, 400 Boys, and to me there really was a lot of The Warriors influence in there. I mentioned that to Tim, and that seems to be agreeable.

I was also looking specifically at a movie called City of God; it’s a Brazilian film. There’s so much in that film that I just kept looking at it for reference. The warm colors, the grittiness of it, the way the director dealt with multiple characters. I thought there were a lot of little lessons I was trying to learn from that because there’s definitely a lot of characters in 400 Boys. Giving each character the same amount of importance is what I wanted, more than just little sidekicks.

How did you decide upon that striking angular shape language and saturated color palette for 400 Boys?

Valley: This cocktail that makes the stylistic look of the animation has been brewing for a long time and has to do with the people that I’ve worked with. So, specifically, that’s Jamie Hewlett from Gorillaz and Peter Chung, the Æon Flux guy. One of them is about stylistic simplicity and graphicness. That’s Jamie Hewlett. Peter Chung is more like total detail, precision, with manga influences. We’ve been cobbling together this crew that started with Zima Blue, and we’ve done about six productions since then. We’ve been adding people and stylistically adding some new wrinkles to our little bag of tricks to push things a little bit further. On this production, I think we did end up biting off a little bit more than we can chew.

The David Fincher-directed episode, Don’t Stop, features The Red Hot Chili Peppers doing a hilarious live performance in marionette form. How did that come together?

Miller: It was as simple as me calling David and saying, “Dude, you need to do an episode for this season. We need some high-powered director talent.” And I told him I wanted him to do a music video. He said, “OK I’m going to do The Red Hot Chili Peppers as puppets, Team America-style.” It was that quick, because he had the idea in his head and it had been kicking around forever. My secret agenda was to restrain him by giving him a song, because it could only be so long and it couldn’t go over. And the rest sort of came from him and the team at Blur Studio.

Nelson: The band was fantastic, and during the whole mo-cap session they brought their own instruments. Those are very amazingly high-quality, priceless things that they brought to be scanned so they could make it accurate. And they just had a great time. Since they’re friends, I think they brought their A-game too, to make sure we had all the motions that we needed.

Miller: I think it’s great that those guys have so much trust in David. There was no question of, “Are you sure this is a good idea?” They were just so down with it. I have no idea if David showed them any of the work-in-progress stuff because it came together rather quickly. David is so precise, sometimes you have to decode his critiques because they’re written in haiku form. But once you understand it, they’re very precise and the episode is f—ing beautiful.

Love, Death + Robots Volume 4 premieres Thursday, May 15. The three previous seasons are currently streaming on Netflix. See more details about Vol. 4 in our prior post here.