Oats Studios

Nice selection of sci-fi and fantasy shorts. Would love to see some of them expanded upon. I especially like the God episodes, very amusing, the Vietnam episode and the very short Gdansk.

It is an experimental show to find out which genre the public likes more in order for the makers to create a feature film. The show is a collection of short movies carrying different, fun ideas. Definitely worth a watch.

I can't really give it a solid good score because it's a lot of short vignettes (roughly 20min) that are the kernels of a potential full length film. So none of the stories have a definitive beginning or ending. But rather just a taste of what could be. The exceptions being the "infomercials". The sci-fi material is solid, however the comedy doesn't really work for me. Pretty much falls flat on its face if I'm honest. Getting back to the sci-fi though. There were a few intriguing concepts that, in my opinion, warrant some looking into. Like Rakka, Firebase, Zygote and perhaps Adam. If you're a movie enthusiast, this might be right up your alley.

Usually, with a collection show like this, I'd review each one individually, but this odd collection, from Neill Blomkamp's independent studio is too esoteric and, in most cases, short to justify that sort of approach. So I'll review them as one.

"Oats Studio" as titled on Netflix is a series of short films, some live action, some high-level CGI creations. Though there is generally little in terms of through story in most of the episodes, general themes, such as post-apocalyptic worlds, robotic uprisings and science fiction horror settings.

Truth be told, you're not really meant to consume these shorts as you might a similar compendium such as "Love, Death and Robots". Those are a series of short stories, whereas the films featured here are generally much closer to tech demos or proof of concepts - that would be shown to gauge interest in further development. Some of the ideas are indeed reasonably interesting and I might be interested if they were developed further - through truth be told, most of them feel like ideas that have been explored before. The worst ones were, for me, the ones that attempted to be comedies. The "Bad President" and the "Cooking with Bill" episodes were a major waste of time for all involved. Two other largely live action ones, "Rakka" starring Sigourney Weaver and "Zygote" starring Dakota Fanning were much better - though, for me, it's the one series that produced two episodes, the CGI series "Adam" that held the most potential.

I mean, given that you can probably burn through the whole series is about an hour, and from that something is likely to peak your interest a bit, maybe you should give it a try - just don't expect much pay off from the good ones, or that any of it will live long in the memory.

First of all, almost all episodes are inconclusive, and that was the point, to raise funds to develop them, and that's ok. It has some good stuff in it, Firebase is really good, I wish I could see the ending of that. Same with Rakka. There are some good ideas. Zygote and Gdansk are interesting.

For me all the "funny" episodes failed completely, I guess that's not my kind of humor. AT ALL. It's too repetitive and sometimes naive/pointless. For instance, the cooking show, I saw the first two gizmos, and I think I skipped the last ones to the next episode, they were all too obvious and repetitive and not really funny, just parodying something won't make it automatically hilarious. Same with the president one, too far fetch (though extravagant presidents exist of course, like that crazy Thailand dude), Kapture and God, they made no sense and they were too obvious at the same time. And again, for me, they're not even funny to justify them.

There are some things that didn't make sense, like why are people in Kapture filming for VHS? I guess it's just for the "feeling" of a shaky cam/low quality video? Makes no sense when they're using drones, and mind control they don't have a decent camera? Also, if you want to make humor episodes, you need to hire a good comedy writer. There's a lot to learn from Love, Death & Robots about how to make comedy shorts.

Again, I don't want to be harsh, the "serious" chapters had something redeemable about them, but the funny ones are plain bad.