Have you seen Zima Blue? It's an episode of Netflix's Love, ..

Have you seen Zima Blue? It's an episode of Netflix's Love, Death, & Robots collection of unique short films. It's only 10 minutes, animation and narration. For me, it felt beautiful, cosmic, simple, a relief. Perhaps you'd like to see it!

I describe it here, which is a spoiler, but I feel it would be worth seeing/hearing later on as well. (Zima Blue was recommended to me. I haven't seen much else from Love, Death, & Robots, as at a glance it looks more intense in pace and gory or dark, and I haven't been seeking that.)

Zima Blue is uniquely simply styled and narrated, about the story of an incredible artist, Zima, who started with portraits, then moved into bigger projects, like huge murals of the cosmos. After a while, he started putting a small blue square/shape in the middle of the expansive universes of his works, then bigger and bigger blue shapes, until he made a painting that is fully blue. He then creates larger and larger works, such as canvas that stretch into the stratosphere, works that involve painting asteroids etc. The short film narration is about his final work - he tells the story of a girl who created a tiny robot to clean the tiles of her pool, the robot was created just to do that. The girl iteratively adds on to the robot, giving it the ability to see color, have new tools, to try different things to do its job better, to learn more, etc. A brilliant robot. When she passes on, the robot ends up with different owners, who each make their own improvements and abilities to do all kinds of tasks, until eventually, the robot becomes… Zima, the artist. As his final work of art, with an audience of everyone who wants to see him, he recreates that original tiled pool, where he first saw his first color, zima blue, and then he dives in, allows his higher brain functions to fail, my personal favorite scene of all the pieces of technology separating, until he becomes just the original simple pool-cleaning robot again, built just to do one simple thing well, brushing each tile of the pool. For me, this feels like such a relief, for such the one thing I am doing to be my world, to be everything.