Love, Death and Robots’ most beautiful episode was ‘a love letter to Moebius’

There are scary sea monsters, cute zombie apocalypses and haunting alien landscapes in the third volume of Love, Death and Robots. The very pulse of the machine is one of the episodes that stands out. Martha is trapped on Io, a desolate moon of Jupiter, and it is possible that she is communicating with the Moon. It is based on a short story by Michael Swanwick and features an art style that is very similar to that of the late French artist Jean "Moebius"giraud.

I had the chance to talk to Emily Dean, who directed the episode, about how the visuals came about, the challenges of adapting the short story, and why she found herself on a beach. We discuss the episode's end and what it means.

This interview has been edited to make it clear.

What was the first time you read this story? Were you aware of it before?

Blur Studio invited me to read some of the short stories they were considering for the second volume. The very pulse of the machine was the one I found after reading a lot of them. I loved the story from the beginning.

What made it stand out? Did you think that it would work well for an adaptation like this?

The psychological element to the story and the idea of a woman on the moon trying to survive drew me in. I loved the female point of view, but I also loved the conversation that this character was having with this unknown entity. I thought that was very important, not just because of the physical nature of trying to survive on a desolate moon but also because of being in conversation with something greater than oneself. That was very interesting to me.

Some of the stuff may be hard to translate to animation. There is lots of internal dialogue in the short story. What did you do to get that psychological element across?

The author of the short story acknowledged that it was difficult to adapt for a film. The writer of this short story is Philip Glass. Because, in the short story, there is more of an interiority to the character, and that is very difficult to portray in a third-person way in a film. That was a lot of work. A lot of the interior emotions that Martha was feeling had to be externalized. The animation of the character herself struggling in this environment and the heightening of the stakes of the environment made the world feel very dangerous.

You may have seen a post that Michael wrote about this adaptation. What did you think about that? He was very excited about what you did.

It was a nice surprise.

Image: Netflix

How did you decide on how the Io entity would sound? The voice was less human and more ambiguous.

In the storyboarding phase, when we are putting together the animatic, we use scratch vocals to test out different reads. Initially, we had a very robotic voice. It was stunting and felt like we weren't getting the poetry across and the rhythm of the story. Holly Jade was fantastic and we decided to go with her.

How did you decide on the look? I feel like it could have been a bit darker and more desolate if it had gone the way of Moebius.

I like color and my personal style is very influenced by it. I said I would love to do a love letter to him. I felt that Love, Death and Robots was a good place for him to experiment with his style on-screen, since it was connected to Heavy Metal magazine. I came in with a lot of artwork that made me want to return to Moebius. I said, "I believe in this story because of its psychological elements, because of its communication with the outside world." It lent itself nicely to this style.

How did you come up with those hallucinogenic scenes?

A lot of thought went into it. I stuck to Michael Swanwick's story and we found that it was getting very long. We wanted to push the elements a bit more to capture the essence of the story. In the next passes, I would go into the edit bay, close the door, and just draw, put on music, and put that into storyboards. Giant astronauts were one of the crazy ideas. You can see a part of it in the hallucinatory sequence.

I wanted to capture this feeling underwater. When I was growing up in Australia, I used to go swimming and I was always amazed at how much life there was under the water. This story was about how things aren't always what you think they are. There is thriving life below the moon.

Do you remember any crazy ideas that didn't work out in the end?

Some technological limitations were present. I thought Martha's body was melting in this way. She was walking as bits of her body floated in the air. It was very hard to do. We thought that we were probably going away from the story.

Image: Netflix

You were involved with this. Is it possible to translate the Moebius style to 3D.

They are great in Japan. I give them a lot of praise for what they've done. We had to work with some French artists to do some concept art to demonstrate the difference in style, because they came from a background of animation. The studio team went back to basics in this new look, which was fun because I used to do substitute teaching. That was enjoyable for me.

It was very difficult on the technological side. I believe that Polygon had to make a lot of changes to their software in order to accommodate this project. The idea of this piece being part of volume two was first proposed in the summer of 2019. The piece was pushed to volume three because it was difficult and because of the Pandemic. It was very easy to lose focus when you have so many lines all across the background and on the character, so there was a lot of back and forth on where every line should be. Integrating the character with the environment

The discussion was about color. I am very proud of the work that was done on this piece. When solid sulfur is molten, it emits a blue color. We used that as a template for our script. I wanted to show how when you see it from a different perspective, you see it completely differently, and that's what the midday to night kind of color palette is for. The moon is teeming with life.

Is there any other way that you could have used the extra time?

I was supposed to travel to Japan to work with the team at Polygon, but that didn't happen. A reference was needed for how an astronauts would move across a desert. I went to the Santa Monica beach and filmed myself dragging a dead body around on the beach and doing my own stunts, which was a lot of work, because I didn't have a motorcycle. The weight of the body was shown to show how tired the body is from dragging a heavy weight. We talked about the differences between gravity on Io and on Earth. We wanted it to be believable. We went with something close to Earth's gravity.

The end of the story is left to the reader or the viewer. What do you think about Martha?

I decided to go further than Michael did. She jumps and flies in the short story. I wanted to see what was underneath the lava and what was underneath the surface. We follow Martha as she plunges into the depths. I think she does merge with Io. I wasn't interested in whether she merges with Io. Is she still Martha? I wanted to let the audience know that.