From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject You’ve Never Seen Anything Quite Like Amazon’s Undone. We Mean That Literally.
Date September 16, 2019 12:00 AM
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[This visually stunning show is a trippy sci-fi drama and a lovely
story about a woman dealing with trauma, all in one.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

YOU’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING QUITE LIKE AMAZON’S UNDONE. WE MEAN
THAT LITERALLY.  
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Emily Todd VanDerWerff
September 13, 2019
Vox
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_ This visually stunning show is a trippy sci-fi drama and a lovely
story about a woman dealing with trauma, all in one. _

Undone is produced using rotoscoping, an animation technique rarely
used on television., Amazon Prime Video

 

_In _Watch This_, Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff tells you
what she’s watching on TV — and why you should watch it
too. __READ THE ARCHIVES HERE_
[[link removed]]_. This week:
Amazon’s new animated series _Undone
[[link removed]]_, whose entire first season is
available today. Watch it __on Amazon Prime Video_
[[link removed]]_._

Alma is having a series of very bad weeks. Her routine is dull. Her
boyfriend loves her way more than she can muster up affection for him.
She dislikes her sister’s fiancé (and who her sister is becoming as
a result of being engaged to him).

And that’s _before_ she gets into a massive car crash, starts
seeing a vision of her dead father, and discovers that her
consciousness can travel through time. (You know, that old story!)

This is the part where I would usually list some of the shows
that _Undone_ [[link removed]] is most
similar to in order to give you an idea of what it’s like. But there
aren’t any, not really. _Undone_ is an intimate examination of one
woman’s personal traumas and mental state; it’s also a wild sci-fi
drama. It’s a story about a family torn apart by tragedy and grief,
and it’s an animated series that uses its unique visual style to
create a dreamy, feathery unreality where you can never trust the path
ahead of you.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Even the standard critics’ trick of naming earlier shows
that _Undone_ co-creators Raphael Bob-Waksberg
[[link removed]] and Kate Purdy
[[link removed]] have worked on
won’t be especially helpful, because the most pertinent one
is _BoJack Horseman_. While _BoJack_ is somewhat similar
to _Undone_ in its willingness to take mental illness seriously,
it’s utterly dissimilar in pretty much every other regard.

The only real way to understand _Undone_ is to watch it for
yourself. Fortunately, it’s one of the best new shows of the fall
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_Undone_ uses an animation technique that has rarely been used on
television animation, and it’s gorgeous

There’s a reason for _Undone_’s distinctive visuals: They’re
the product of rotoscoping, a process by which actors are filmed on
sets, then drawn over by animators, which creates a world that is not
quite real but not quite imaginary, either. It has real weight and
heft, but the people you see on screen can also do impossible things.

So far as I can tell, _Undone_ is the first animated American TV
series to feature rotoscoping across the entirety of a traditional
22-minute episode, with several installments running slightly longer
than even that. (The Adult Swim series _Dream Corp LLC_
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which debuted in 2016, is also rotoscoped, but its episodes are only
11 minutes long and at least part of each one is live-action.)
Rotoscoping grounds Alma’s problems in reality while also allowing
the show to easily depict more fantastical elements, like time passing
rapidly around her or the room she’s in changing into a completely
different setting.

Across the five episodes of the show I’ve seen so far (there will be
eight total in season one), _Undone_’s visuals are both
breathtaking and always in service of the characters. Indeed,
rotoscoping proves to be the ideal way to portray Alma’s gifts,
which might just be a particularly acute manifestation of a
schizophrenia-like mental illness. (It’s heavily implied that her
paternal grandmother struggled with something similar.) The
strangeness of these visuals allows for a neither-nor sort of quality:
creating the sense that Alma might really be able to cross space and
time, but also that she might be dealing with a serious mental
condition that requires treatment.

Normally, “Is it mental illness or is it superpowers?” is
dangerous territory for fiction to wander into since it can
inadvertently create the sense that a character should avoid seeking
treatment for their mental illness to help sustain whatever their
superpowers are. _Undone_ cannily avoids that pitfall thanks to two
different strengths. The first is the way that Purdy and Bob-Waksberg
embrace the idea that if Alma’s abilities and her mental illness
really are linked, then her abilities would often function in the same
way as a mental illness — urging her to push away those around her
and further cocoon herself within her own headspace. (Pay close
attention to how one character in particular stands in for this
devastating side effect of mental illness.)

The second is Rosa Salazar
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star and an actor who’s deserved a role this rich for some time. Her
turn in the third season of _Parenthood_ — where she played the
pregnant woman whose baby Joel and Julia hoped to adopt — should
have landed her a lot more work, but she’s instead been bombing
around in parts not quite up to her talent.

Her performance in _Alita: Battle Angel_ earlier this year (she
played Alita) proved she’s up to the task of starring in a
blockbuster, but it’s _Undone_ that really spotlights her
apparently considerable gift to register real human emotions — even
beneath layer after layer of visuals placed over and atop her (in the
form of rotoscoped animation on _Undone,_ computer effects
in _Alita_). She isn’t afraid to make Alma prickly and weird and
sometimes a total jerk. And _Undone_ isn’t afraid to follow her
down into the character’s depths to see what makes her the way she
is.

I’m still a little unsure about the way the series desperately wants
to equate mental illness and otherworldly powers (there are occasional
invocations of shamanism), but in its early episodes, _Undone_ is a
frequently beautiful and thought-provoking ride. I can’t wait to see
more.

Undone _is streaming __on Amazon Prime Video_
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