Rotoscoping Female Subjectivity and Emotion Work in Undone

“Undone – Official Trailer | Prime Video”

This blog post about Undone (Amazon Prime, 2019-2022) functions as a coping mechanism in light of Undone’s cancellation after two seasons, but also sets out to shed light on fragmented selves and multiverses, tropes that have been particularly prevalent in recent women-centric US TV. Indeed, multiverses and fragmented selves are all the rage in popular culture right now, from WandaVision (Disney+, 2021) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) to Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019-present). The pervasiveness of these themes reflects contemporary engagement with (social) media where everything indeed seems to be happening all at once, as well as the simultaneity of competing cultural narratives in the post-truth society, especially in a US context. Above all, however, the looping and time-travel narratives and multiverses in women-centric television and film reflect two important issues. First, they work through a continuing amalgamation of overlapping, yet often contradictory feminist discourses, such as neoliberal feminism, postfeminism, popular feminism, and strands of radical, intersectional feminism. Second, they mirror the relentless pull of still-dominant popular neoliberal feminist discourse centring around positivity and resilience (see, for example, McRobbie, 2020, Orgad and Gill, 2018, and Rottenberg, 2018). This blog post focuses primarily on the last point. In our neoliberal, late capitalist times, women in particular still ideally strive to be everything everywhere all at once due to the imperative to continuously manage oneself and others, including one’s own feelings and those of others, which involves both emotional labour in workplaces and emotion work in the private sphere and interpersonal relationships (Hochschild, 1983). Undone's time loops dramatize and exaggerate the emotion work that is tied to self-management and resilient bouncing back (Orgad and Gill, 2018) from setbacks and failure.

“How Amazon’s ‘Undone’ Animates Dreams with Rotoscoping and Oil Paints | War Stories”.

Undone, created by Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, follows its protagonist Alma (Rosa Salazar) as she experiences time and space differently after having survived a car crash. The story then unfolds around Alma’s newly-found time-bending capabilities which she uses to investigate and potentially undo her father’s death 19 years prior, with her father (Bob Odenkirk) acting as her mentor and guide who only Alma can see and with whom only she can interact, and her resulting strange behaviour worries her partner and the rest of her family who fear she may be experiencing psychotic episodes. Undone is not only Amazon Prime’s first adult animated original series, but also its first programme that features the animated technique of rotoscoping. Its creators had previously worked together on the critically acclaimed adult animated series BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014-2020) and collaborated with Dutch director, animator, painter, composer and storyboard artist Hisko Hulsing to create Undone. Hulsing goes into great detail about Undone’s rotoscoping animation in a video for Ars Technica (see video below). He foregrounds rotoscoping animation’s ability to give characters depth and relatability and explains how this conveys the complexities and subtleties of characters’ feelings and their dialogues better than other types of animation. In addition, it creates a storyworld that always feels a bit unreal, mirroring Alma’s confusion as to what is real and what might be a dream, or perhaps even psychosis. Hulsing also emphasises the efforts that went into the production of Undone and distinguishes the show’s rotoscoping animation from other rotoscoping techniques (for example, Undone is the only rotoscoped streaming series in which every single frame’s background is an oil painting) and thus positions Undone as an example of contemporary complex or quality TV (see, for example, Mittell, 2015).

Undone’s rotoscoping animation, as well as other processes such as 3D and 2D animation, colouring, shading, and compositing, blur the boundaries between ‘reality’ and Alma’s memories and her experiences of other characters’ memories (or, perhaps, her psychotic episodes as the narrative incorporates Alma’s looming fear of congenital schizophrenia). It also allows for different and disparate memories—for instance, Alma’s and her boyfriend Sam’s (Siddharth Dhananjay) various childhood memories—to seamlessly ‘flow’ into one another when Alma tries to relate to Sam during a fight by experiencing his memories alongside her own. Undone’s particular form of rotoscoping animation articulates the ambiguity of Alma’s experience of reality, time, and space due to every frame’s oil-painted  background, which makes, as Hulsing points out in the Ars Technica clip above, even the supposedly ‘real’ scenes seem slightly unreal. However, due to the 3D animation, 2D animation, shading, colouring, and compositing that happens after the initial tracing of the rotoscoped footage, characters—especially their facial expressions—appear more real and complex than is the case in other narratives using rotoscoping (as Hulsing explains this, a comparison between Undone and A Scanner Darkly is shown in the video). Therefore, Undone’s visual aesthetics aim to convey Alma’s emotional range in a more complex way, showing how Alma experiences others’ memories. This, together with the dialogue and the looping narrative also emphasises the ways in which Alma manages her own and others’ emotions. Thus, the narrative opens up possibilities to show rather than tell when articulating Alma’s subjectivity as relational rather than sovereign (for an incisive analysis of sovereign versus relational selves within the context of neoliberal resilience, see Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience, 2020). This may also relate to the way Ryan Pierson describes how the rotoscoped line in Mary Beams’s work “makes clear that there is more around it than what is  being traced. More than the swimmer or the waterline. More to the world. More to be loved” (2020). The relentless time loops in the programme’s first season have Alma repeatedly work through difficult moments and conversations with her mother, her sister, and her boyfriend. Undone can therefore also be understood through Amy Dobson and Akane Kanai’s assertion that the “portrayal of young women’s mental health in recent female-centred TV shows is perhaps a space where the tension between a neoliberal affective orientation and the reflective questioning of such is most apparent” (2018, 13). Through fantasy and animation, Alma’s feelings when she—as she explains to her father inside Sam’s memory—is “working through something” are rendered in a way that foreground the intense emotion work (see Hochschild, 1983) that goes into relating to oneself and others, as Alma effectively manages her own and others’ feelings time loop after time loop.

“Alma’s Hospital Time Travelling Adventures | Undone | Prime Video”.

As Alma’s own experiences blur with others’ memories or perceptions of the world around them, this process articulates the paradoxical idea that a neoliberal (female) subject must take on a myriad of different roles. She has to be everything while it is taken for granted that she presents herself as a unified, independent self—this idea is so pervasive in contemporary culture that it has become the tagline of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023): “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” Undone’s time loops are exhausting for Alma as they require resilience and the ability to bounce back again and again from failed attempts at managing others and oneself. In this way, Alma embodies Orgad and Gill’s bounce-backable woman who is injured, yet resilient, and “disavows and self-polices negative feelings and dispositions” (2018, 5). The way the rotoscoping animation makes Alma repeatedly encounter others and manipulate time to start over when encounters do not go well also mirrors the neoliberal common sense that through enough hard work, subjects can gain control over their lives and succeed. Thus, the work the loops and repetitions do concerning Alma’s ability to pause and go back and work through situations repeatedly is that they provide a chance to work through difficult feelings and situations in a way that allows for improvement. This way of managing one’s feelings and self-improvement is a wonderful thing in theory, but the problems that arise from this are that characters can get lost in the narrative without actually moving forward in time, feeding an inability or unwillingness to cope with difficulties in a way that is accepting of failure and negativity without the need to turn it into positivity.

The clip above from the first season’s second episode is part of an even longer time loop where Alma repeatedly works through conversations with family members and her boyfriend until their outcome is more positive than when they initially happened. The sequence articulates Alma’s emotion work and negotiates neoliberal and neoliberal feminist ideals of happiness, positivity, resilience and self-management and improvement. Some of the repetitive loops in season one where Alma has the same conversations with other characters again and again to manage her own and their feelings are similar to Nathan Fielder’s docu-comedy programme The Rehearsal (2022-present), where he helps people prepare (again and again) to work through difficult situations and conversations. Undone is thus part of a slew of contemporary pop culture narratives that enact and question the merit and existential meaning of manipulating time and space to manage our own and others’ feelings.

**Article published: January 19, 2024**  

References

Dobson, Amy Shields and Akane Kanai. 2018. “From ‚can-do’ girls to insecure and angry: Affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no.6: 771-786.

Gill, Rosalind and Shani Orgad. 2018. “The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism.” Sociological Research Online 23, no. 2: 1-19.

Hochschild, Arlie Russel. 1983. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

McRobbie, Angela. 2020. Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. London: Polity.

Mittel, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The poetics of contemporary television storytelling. New York: NYU Press.

Pierson, Ryan. 2020. Figure and force in animation aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rottenberg, Catherine. 2018. The rise of neoliberal feminism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Biography

Sarah Lahm is a postgraduate researcher at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research is concerned with complex female characters in contemporary US TV, as well as the aesthetics and storytelling practices of twenty-first century ‘quality TV’. She is currently writing up her PhD thesis on ambivalence and female subjectivity in recent women-centric half-hour dramas, in which she investigates articulations of the contradictions of current feminist discourses, such as time loops and the trope of the fragmented or split self.