Ranking Robots: Good Hunting

Ranking Robots is the newest tri-weekly series that will be making its appearance on the site every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as I make my way through Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots. For those that are unaware of the Netflix Original, the show is a series of short stories that have to do with, you guessed it, Love, Death, and Robots. If anyone reading this ever saw the incredible collection of short films called the Animatrix (if you haven’t go check that out now) then you won’t have any trouble jumping into this new series.

Mixing steampunk, the ancient stories of Chinese myth, and modern-anime, Good Hunting tells the incredibly dense story of a young boy and girl growing up in a world that is ever-changing. In just a few short years the young children go from witnessing their parents battling one another in an eternal fight of man against monster, to watching the once ancient village begin to shapeshift like the girl’s mother once did. Instead of changing into a beautiful Fox though, this once tranquil village has turned into a bustling metropolis filled with foreigners and steam-powered machines.

Good Hunting is a story that at first left me uninterested but with patience, I realized that over the course of the 17-minute story, a slow burn was being realized and that by the end something impressive would be revealed. The short attempts and accomplishes the impressive task of telling a story that not only takes place over the span of years but actually changes art style and genre throughout those years of storytelling.

I praised the series first story Sonnie’s Edge for being able to tell a story that often takes shows an entire season to tell and that praise now needs to be moved over to Good Hunting. Going from a young boy and his father sword fighting monsters in a Chinese village to that young boy now an adult working on machines in a modern-day city, the story that is told could easily be multiple seasons of a show. The pace is out of control, never moving too fast or slow for the audience, and everything fits together like a perfect puzzle. Good Hunting takes the concept and theme of the show and reveals that the possibilities of storytelling truly are endless.

One comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s