Rotoscoping
must be the official animation style of Texas. After Richard Linklater used the
technique of layering animation over live-action film cells for his Austin-set Walking
Life, the team behind Bojack Horseman
have employed it to tell a tale of [certain] depression, [likely] madness,
and [possible] time travel in San Antonio. The result is Undone, the Amazon
Empire’s first animated series for adults, which premieres this Friday.
Alma
Winograd-Diaz’s family must have sky-high auto insurance rates. Roughly twenty years
after her father Jacob Winograd perished in a car crash, Winograd-Diaz has a
doozy of her own wreck. She wakes suffering from mild short-term amnesia,
unaware she broke up with her loyal boyfriend Sam not long before. Determined
to “be there for her,” Sam opts not to fill her in on this little detail.
Eventually,
Sam’s white lie is bound to catch up with him, but it will take several
twenty-some-minute episodes. In the short-term, Alma is quite distracted by her
father, who has been appearing too her through some kind of astral woo-woo,
pressuring her to help him solve his murder. Winograd is convinced he and his
research assistant (whom he was absolutely not having an affair with) were
bumped off because of his research into time travel. Having bobbed and weaved
between life and death, Winograd-Diaz’s consciousness might be ready to embrace
the non-linearity of time—or maybe she is losing her grasp on reality, like her
schizophrenic grandmother.
You
have to admire the ambition of creators Raphael Bob-Waksberg & Kate Purdy,
who dive whole-heartedly into some heavy thematic material. Unfortunately, most
of their character development work focused on Winograd-Diaz, a whiny,
self-centered, self-defeating, self-loathing millennial, while most of the
other characters are largely stock characters we can auto-fill on our own:
bossy mother, princess-like younger sister, tolerant boss, doormat boyfriend.
The notable exception is dear old dad, who is an intriguing cypher that slowly
but surely takes on fuller dimensions.
Only
the first five episodes (out of eight) have been supplied to reviewers, but
thus far, the series errs on the side of family drama. Honestly, the only
aspect of the Winograd-Diaz’s family most viewers will care about is the
suspected murder of her father. It is too bad, because there is a lot of cool Inception kind of stuff going on. It
potentially represents an intelligent return to the mind-over-matter school of
time travel movies that goes back at least as far as Somewhere in Time, but has far richer theoretical underpinnings
this time around.
Given
the rotoscope technique, we really can talk about full performances from the Undone cast, not just voice-over work.
Although he is deceptively reserved, there is something about the scoped-over
Bob Odenkirk as Winograd that holds viewers’ attention and imagination rapt. It
is also worth noting emerging indie genre superstar Sheila Vand (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night)
portrays his student-assistant, but most of her featured work presumably comes
in episodes six to eight. As Winograd-Diaz, Rosa Salazar makes us want to bang
our heads against a park bench, but that means she nails the character.
Alfred
Hitchcock’s Spellbound is still
probably the greatest head-shrinking thriller of all time, thanks to the
imagery he and Salvador Dali crafted. At its best, Undone presents psycho-razzle dazzle at a similar level. The
problem is all the patience-sapping melodrama. Recommended for the
expressionistic visuals to Prime members, who have already paid for it, Undone premieres this Friday (9/13) on
Amazon.
