Amazon’s ‘Undone’ is the best new show this fall
From the moment you begin watching “Undone,” you are unsettled.
Amazon’s new animated series (streaming Friday, ★★★★) uses discomfort to its advantage, messing with our perceptions of what animation and live-action television is supposed to look like. Over the course of its eight exquisite episodes the goal, it seems, is to confuse and disquiet its viewers. In other words, it wants to “undo” us as much as its protagonist is undone. And it works.
Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy (”BoJack Horseman”), “Undone” is a half-hour drama, a magical realist story of an aimless 20something named Alma (Rose Salazar) and her search for answers about her past.
Alma is self-destructive and stuck, unhappy with her routine relationship with boyfriend Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay). She’s close with her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral), but judgmental of Becca’s conventional life choices, and she takes far more from the sibling relationship than she gives. Alma is also on shaky ground with her mother, Camila (Constance Marie), whom Alma accuses of hiding details about the death of her father, Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), when the girls were young. Alma wastes away unhappily as a day care attendant, and feels her life is boring and stagnant.
That stagnation ends quickly when Alma survives a horrific car accident and discovers she not only can see and speak to her dead father, but she can also move through time and change the past. Jacob wants Alma to go back in time and prevent his death. Alma wants to help, but she also wants to put the pieces of her life back together. Her lapses in memory and judgment that result from jumping through time and space aren’t exactly helping.
“Undone” uses an animation style called rotoscoping, in which animators trace over real images of actors, which creates a feeling of disorientation. The look is both realistic and contrived, which is a unique and discomfiting aesthetic. In “Undone,” the form follows this function: While you want to believe that Alma can see Jacob and can really travel through time, there are moments (at least in the first five episodes made available for preview) when you wonder whether she
has a mental illness like schizophrenia, as her grandmother did.
Amid the oil-painting-style backdrops and scenes floating through space, “Undone” is a deeply personal story about a woman dealing with the limits of her own memory, and explores how stories about ourselves shape who we become. It is both universal and painfully specific.
Alma, infused with life by the animation and by Salazar’s superb vocal performance, is desperate to know the truth about her father. So she dives into an investigation of the past, an impulse her practical, forward-thinking mother can’t understand. Her frustration with the things she doesn’t know – how her father died, what her boyfriend keeps from her or why her sister jumps into picket-fence life with a doltish fiance – is the tension that fuels the tightly wound series.
“Undone” may take some getting used to by viewers who expect a stark line dividing animation and live-action. Although so well-written you think you could get lost in it, the nagging uncanny valley in which it sits means you’re always aware that you are watching something with artifice built in. But very quickly, the discomfort becomes part of the genius.