UNNERVING & REVELATORY
The animated Undone surprises TV world by telling its character’s story differently
LOS ANGELES Despite the catastrophic crash that opens the series, it takes some time for Undone to reveal its story’s surprising depths. It seems to be about Alma (Rosa Salazar), a San Antonio woman operating in a depressive fog, hoping that one day something extraordinary might happen to make life worth living. She is a preschool teacher, has a perfectionist younger sister (Angelique Cabral), a perpetually worried mother (Constance Marie) and an easygoing boyfriend (Siddharth Dhananjay), who insists he likes Alma the way she is, to her knee-jerk suspicion.
She’s never got over the sudden death of her father (Bob Odenkirk). She’s disaffected, very funny and a little mean despite herself. She also believes that she has “a broken brain” that isn’t worth inflicting on other people.
None of this is particularly new ground for TV to tread — but Undone is determined to tell this story differently.
The most obvious new aspect of the series is that it’s not just animated, but animated in a rotoscope style that takes live-action footage and uses varying artistic techniques like oil painting to transform it into something a little more uncanny.
So even before Undone takes its hard left turn into science fiction (or something like it), the rotoscope rendering of its characters and world immediately makes it stand out as different and more ambitious than usual.
In the pilot, which stays almost entirely rooted in the banal details of Alma’s everyday life, the surreal animation feels somehow more bizarre than it does later as the show takes a deep dive into Alma’s supposedly “broken” brain. This combination of unusual form and function is ultimately unsurprising given the creative team behind Undone. Co-creators Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, as well as many of the supervising producers, come from the equally wild animated world of Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, which threads the spectres of trauma and mental illness through a Technicolor animated world populated by anthropomorphic narcissists.
Purdy is also credited with some of the most devastating BoJack scripts, including the season 4 standout Time’s Arrow, which documented a woman’s scarring backstory amid her unravelling reality.
As Alma explores the flickering walls of her own mind, not to mention her father’s surprising place within it, Undone follows BoJack’s reputation for pairing unusual animation with slicing wit and surprising pathos. It also gives Salazar an opportunity to prove just how good and charismatic she is no matter how her image is rendered. In another actor’s hands, Alma could easily become too sour or inaccessible. In Salazar’s, she’s always understandable. Salazar can also deliver the hell out of a quip; Alma’s wicked sense of humour keeps the show sharp even through its deliberately smeared esthetic. Odenkirk, for his part, soon clicks into a disarmingly curt delivery that keeps his character grounded despite his mysterious roots.
Watching Undone is a deeply unnerving experience. There’s certainly no other show like it, which at this point is truly no small feat.
Variety.com