TV Review: Undone (2019). The gorgeous visuals of this animated series are a conduit for a touchingly human story.

Image courtesy of Amazon

Tv Review: Undone (2019) by Ben Jeffries (14/9/2019)

Season 1 (13/9/2019)

8 Episodes, 22 minutes each

Drama, Fantasy, Animation

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Undone bends reality itself with it’s stunning visuals to tell a very human story.

Alma Winogard-Diaz (Rosa Salazar) is a 28 year old woman who is terrified that she’s going to spend the rest of her life standing in supermarket aisles deciding which can of beans to buy. She’s worn down by the sheer banality of her daily life until, after a nearly fatal car accident, Alma discovers that her relationship to time and space has been fundamentally altered. Recovering from her injuries in hospital, Alma is visited by her long dead father, Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), who tells Alma that if she can learn to control her new powers she might be able to uncover the truth behind his death, and even save him. Created by Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob Waksberg, Undone uses it’s stunningly gorgeous visuals and dream-like plot to explore the tenuous nature of our relationship to reality with a touching honesty and surprising humour. It would be easy to let the wild imagery run away with the show, reducing it to a series of impressive yet meaningless vignette’s, but Undone balances it’s incredible art against a deeply personal narrative and a collection of superb performances to tell a story that’s both visually and intellectually engaging.

With production design from Hisko Hulsing (Cobain: Montage of Heck), Undone is presented in a style of animation called rotoscoping. It’s a laborious technical process where an animator traces over the reference material of a live action performance frame by frame. You’ll be familiar with the results if you’ve seen the music video for A-ha’s Take On Me or director Richard Linklater’s 2006 film A Scanner Darkly. The result here is a production that has a watery, wobbly imperfection to the characters as we see them in their animated form. The backgrounds and static objects of the world, provided entirely in post and drawn in warm pastel colours and soft shadows, appear solid and steady. It’s the elements of the scene that are animated over real performances that have a shifting, ethereal, look to them as the animators capture different elements of a performers face frame by frame. Characters appear almost photo-realistic in one second and cartoonishly simple in the next. Facial features move about from moment to moment, making it difficult to judge expressions at times, distracting the viewers eye from the centre of the frame with a hair line that unexpectedly changes shape, or a trick of perspective that makes a face look odd and unreal.

Image courtesy of Amazon

At first it seems like someone went to a lot of un-necessary work to animate a show that easily could have been filmed in live action, but as the second episode begins to introduce more fantastic imagery and non-linear storytelling, the reasoning behind the choice of medium becomes clear. As Jacob and Alma work on perfecting her ability to direct the flow of time we’re treated to a visual feast. Alma steps from her living room into a childhood memory, seamlessly transitioning between realities. She tries to get out of a bed only to find herself floating in space, weightless amid the stars, before crashing back to the pillow as the mundane universe reforms around her. She meets herself both coming and going as scenes loop themselves together in complicated patterns that contain past, present, and future. The animation allows Undone to explore the boundaries of Alma’s perception while, as reality shifts and swirls around her, Alma always remains of a piece with the world in which she finds herself. Rather than a live action character on a cgi background, disconnected and out of place, Alma and the environment around her always feel contiguous, made from the same stuff. It gives the viewing experience an immersive feel that carries the audience along in the dream-like flow of the narrative, sidestepping the barriers of disbelief that heavy cgi effects have to overcome.

The use of rotoscoping is a daring visual choice that supports the dream-like nature of the story, but also forces the audience to look at the world from Alma’s perspective. With her history of mental illness, Alma often has trouble relating to the people in her life. Understanding people is so difficult for Alma that at times they seem more like things than people. In moments when she feels close to someone, they tend to take on a steadier, more realistic, visual aspect but people Alma isn’t close to are often rendered nearly featureless. Just as Alma has difficulty relating to the people in her life, the audience is kept unsettled by the uncanny and shifting nature of the characters on screen. Undone makes it clear that Alma finds it hard to keep herself grounded and focused in a world that, from her perspective, is neither of those things and through it’s powerful visual direction the show delivers that experience to the audience in a palpable way.

Image courtesy of Amazon

Even obscured beneath a layer of animation, Rosa Salazar’s (Alita: Battle Angel) energetic and nuanced performance in the role of Alma drives the entire show. She’s a complex character, with a web of emotional and intellectual motivations that propel the narrative. Alma is fixated on her father and her need to understand his death, and she also desperately wishes for a life less ordinary. She has an antagonistic relationship with her mother Camila (Constance Marie), whom Alma finds overbearing as she imposes her love on her daughter, and more than once Alma seems driven by simple spite as she rebels against her mothers controlling tendencies. While her character powers the dramatic story, Alma’s irreverent personality also infuses the show with a very human sense of humour. She’s funny, but in the way that a regular person is funny rather than some sitcom character spouting laugh lines. She makes lame puns, she needles her boyfriend Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay) and teases her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral), she can be eye-rollingly sarcastic or unreservedly playful. Underpinning these aspects of Alma’s personality is a deep sadness and frustration with which Salazar informs her performance. It’s a measured, deeply expressive, performance that is compellingly real even in it's animated form.

The choice to pair Salazar with Bob Odenkirk as her father Jacob is a terrific piece of casting. His understated demeanor and effortless charm lend Jacob an air of intelligence and sophistication as he attempts to guide Alma on her journey through time and space. He’s a patient teacher to Alma’s clowning student, calmly trying to make the heady concepts of time travel and alternate planes of consciousness easily digestible as he gives her advice to help cope with the disruptive effects of her new powers. At the same time there’s a sad neediness to the character that complicates the relationship as their competing emotional needs strain their bond. Both Salazar and Odenkirk have such natural, organic, deliveries that, even when it comes to the fantastic subject matter of time travel, the audience is never left gaping at the screen in disbelief after a download of wild exposition. There's something about the way the pair deliver information, and the way that the show approaches it's material from a character first perspective, that reduces the shows reality bending concepts down to a human scale.

Undone's subject matter is densely packed into it’s 8 short episodes, but it never feels crowded or overstuffed. In a little under four hours the show covers subjects of mental health, family relationships, time travel, fidelity, trauma, self esteem, spirituality, and the flexibility of reality as we perceive it. There’s a conversational agility to the writing that’s often missing in a show driven by pure plot. With it’s character driven writing Undone touches on one subject, then allows itself to diverge along a conceptual tangent before returning to it’s original train of thought. It’s not always easy to tell what’s real and what’s dream as the show moves from one scene to another in what, at times, feels like a state of free association, but each moment is built on the one before it and supports the one to follow in a way that’s additive to the experience as a whole.

Viewers who enjoy definitive answers and rigid narrative structure might find the dreamy, ambiguous, nature of Undone frustrating as it blends reality and un-reality to explore subjects like mental health and the way perception defines experience. For the most part we experience the world of Undone from Alma’s perspective, and as she steps between different moments in time and space the world shifts around her. Underpinning the gorgeously animated imagery is an undercurrent of unreliability. Is Alma truly experiencing these incredible moments, or are they hallucinations and delusions brought on by the onset of mental illness? Does one answer preclude the other, or can both be true? If you’re the type of viewer who needs a show to provide concrete answers to these types of questions, Undone may prove to be a challenging watch. It’s content to pose the questions and explore the implications they raise but, right up to it’s final moments, avoids becoming didactic or resolute as to which answer is the definitive conclusion.

Undone is a rare piece of surrealist fiction where the visual spectacle remains thematically supportive to the character and tone of the story. Where it could easily have overwhelmed the delicate balance of powerful performance and personal narrative, the aesthetic heights the show reaches only elevate the other elements of the production, and even as the show steps between realities and time frames the intimate focus on character keeps the story thoroughly relatable. Written with a brave honesty and a touching humanity that provides a canvas for personal and affecting performances, Undone is a surprising, emotionally complex, and richly rewarding experience for those looking to step beyond the boundaries of their usual perspective.

9/10

Undone Stars: Rosa Salazar, Bob Odenkirk, Angelique Cabral, Constance Marie, Siddharth Dhananjay

Created by: Kate Purdy, Raphael Bob Waksberg

a Production from: Amazon Studios, Minnow Mountain, Submarine, Tornante Company

Distributed by: Amazon Studios