The Mind-Melting "Undone" Proves Rosa Salazar Is Our Best Animated Actor

Here’s our take on the trippy new Amazon Prime Video series.

Hollywood needed a damn good reason to hide Rosa Salazar’s expressive face behind CGI again, after the big-eyed debacle of Alita: Battle Angel.

Thankfully, Undone is damn good. (But this is the last time, right Hollywood? Back to live-action next. Promise?)

Co-written and co-created by Bojack Horseman’s Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Undone utilises rotoscope animation to tell the story of Alma (Salazar), a foundering 30-something who loses her grip on reality after a car accident and starts seeing her dead dad (Bob Odenkirk) everywhere. He trains her to witness the wild world behind the veil of our more mundane world, as if he's a croaky-voiced Morpheus. Her environments swirl hypnotically, and she gains the ability to trip back and forth through time. Or, maybe Alma’s psychedelic new outlook (and her gift of communicating with a ghost) is just her family’s creeping history of mental illness finally rearing its ugly head, and mixing with the morphine.

Viewers of Undone's first season may wonder if some of Alma’s powerful painkilling medication was dropped into their drinks too, given the mind-bending animation. The act of rotoscoping involves filming actors as per usual and then employing animators to paint over the footage; Undone specifically utilises oil painting on canvas for the backgrounds. This means that you get to see Salazar, Odenkirk and their co-stars in slightly uncanny, animated form, while the scenery shifts and scatters to the whims of director Hisko Hulsing. (The show is also co-created by Kae Purdy, from Bojack too.) Wild, man.

If Undone’s argument for planting a naturally appealing screen presence like Salazar (see the indie comedy Night Owls) in green screen hell is to give her more spellbinding surroundings to react to, then okay, I’ll allow it. After watching the three episodes provided for review by Amazon Prime Video (where the show can be streamed from 13 September), I had to reluctantly admit that the medium fit the message. How better to present the story of a woman who's either losing her mind or discovering new realities?

But it’s not just the animators who deserve praise; it’s Salazar too. Just as in Alita, the gravity of her performance, sardonic sense of humour and her ineffable charisma is never obscured behind those other artists’ handiwork. It also helps that her crackling voice is endearingly emotive in these animated efforts (in fact, it makes the creaky Odenkirk a genius casting choice as her parent). I’m hesitant to say the artists enhance her. But together, they make Undone soar.

In the second episode, plenty of references are made to The Wizard of Oz (including a question of how the Wicked Witch urinates, given she’s a melt-risk whenever near liquid). In 1939, The Wizard of Oz broke Dorothy out of mundanity by shifting from black-and-white to technicolour. Eighty years later, changing the contrast just isn’t enough to jar audiences; the makers of Undone literally needed to remove reality. Here’s hoping the rest of its first season, and wherever the show goes next, finds new ways to unmake our world.

4/5