Season 4 of “Love, Death and Robots,” Netflix‘s adult animated anthology, offers several delights. These include the live-action apocalyptic comedy, “Golgotha,” from creator Tim Miller, and executive producer David Fincher’s “Can’t Stop” music video, with the Red Hot Chili Peppers recreating their iconic 2003 performance at Slane Castle, Ireland, as CG string puppets.
But the biggest delight is the emotionally stirring “Spider Rose,” helmed by series supervising director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Pop Squad” and “Kill Team Kill”), which occupies the same cyberpunk universe as Season 3’s “Swarm.” Both are adapted from Bruce Sterling short stories about human survival on an asteroid mining operation dominated by competing factions: the genetically-engineered Shapers and the cybernetic Mechanists.
In “Spider Rose,” the grieving titular Mechanist (voiced by Emily O’Brien and mo-capped by Miller’s Blur Studio) plots her revenge against the Shaper who murdered her husband. However, that means bartering with the large reptilian Investors, who loan her a cute alien pet she calls Nosy. It is through Nosy that she rediscovers her lost humanity.
“ I love the story because of the emotions, and the idea that this woman has ruined herself in her grief and trying to find her way back has quite a steep price,” Yuh Nelson told IndieWire. “I think that that sort of emotional journey is interesting to me, and also how to show that visually.”
Although “Spider Rose” was always on “the writer’s wall,” it never made the cut until this season, when Yuh Nelson found the right empathetic through line. But, of course, there’s more than meets the eye to Nosy. He’s not mischievous, like a Gremlin, but there’s a definite edge to him. The trick was not overdoing it so that he still looked appealing.
“I love the design process of trying to find something that would make you feel so sympathetic to it,” said Yuh Nelson. Blur Studio provided the effective key frame character animation. But instead of opting for a typical space monkey, Yuh Nelson was drawn to something much more cuddly.
“To me, its purpose was to try and become closer to [Spider Rose],” she said. “But we actually had designs where it was very monkey-like with long, spindly limbs, and it crossed the threshold towards creepy rather than empathetic. So I tried to push it a little bit towards bush baby because that reminds me of cuddly.”
But they made Nosy multifaceted because he appears in two stages: slimy and furry. “We looked at adorable pet frogs from Japan mixed in with French bulldogs for the first stage because they have those adorable butts and that waddle to them,” said Yuh Nelson. “But the second stage was bush baby.”
This enabled Spider Rose to become more attached to Nosy. They play games and she holds it tenderly. “You know how certain creatures camouflage so other creatures won’t eat them? In this case, it’s kind of flipped,” continued Yuh Nelson. “The idea is that creatures will do things to survive by developing these visual defense mechanisms to be more adorable.”
You could say that “Spider Rose” represents the Season 4 poster child of “Love, Death + Robots” in the way it embodies all three parts. “I don’t know if it’s an entry drug for ‘LDR’ because there is a lot of violence,” Yuh Nelson said. “Usually, if people haven’t seen the show before, we recommend that they watch one of the comedies first. In the case of ‘Spider Rose,’ there’s an entire world involved. And we really wanted to make this one like a tentpole: a moment that’s lush and emotional, that’s gonna really reflect the level of the story.”
“Love, Death, and Robots” is streaming on Netflix.
