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.

For being an independent studio the quality of CGI/animation is actually decent. It didn't make me cringe looking at it. The acting was good. It had a few famous people, but for the most part unknown actors. Some stories were moronic and tried to hard, others were solid story telling with inconclusive endings. All in all, this felt like a wannabe Black Mirror and Love, Death & Robots mash up.

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.

Love the small "what if" format to flex creative muscles without committing to a story or ending.

There are a few truly intriguing pieces and several I forgot 5 seconds after finishing.

The first half of Gdansk is a feature length movie I personally wish to see.

The live action "comedy" pieces are the least satisfying. It's all been seen before, and some leans politically into opinion pieces on a recent US president. Compared to the shirts around this, it seems a bit juvenile and absent creativity.

Maybe a combined hour to sit through. It won't leave you wanting more, but there are a few nuggets worth sitting through the grit to find.

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.