'Undone' Trailer: Amazon Takes A Wild Animated Trip Through Time, Space And (Maybe) Reality

Animation is a medium, not a genre. But because most animated projects are geared towards kids and their parents, it can be hard for everyday people to make a proper distinction. But when it comes to Amazon's new trippy drama Undone, it's clear that animation isn't just for kids.

Undone follows a young, depressed woman (Rosa Salazar of Alita: Battle Angel) whose life is irreversibly and wildly changed after a car accident gives her a newfound ability to shift through time. But since this is a scary prospect and she's not really sure what's going on, the ghost of her dead father (Bob Odenirk) is here to help her, and that includes showing her how he actually died. If that sounds weird to you, just wait until you see the Undone trailer.

Featuring rotoscoped animation along the lines of something like Richard Linklater's film A Scanner Darkly, Amazon's new series seamlessly blends the questionably real and surreal, creating a storytelling style that is as gorgeous as it is disorienting. Our own Jacob Hall caught two episodes of the series at Comic-Con last month and noted, "Your mind often reads scenes as three-dimensional and two-dimensional at the same time, perfect for a series that manipulates reality at its whims and allows the absurd, the surreal, the beautiful, and the frightening to invade a scene as the story dictates."

But what about the story? It sounds like that's just as engaging too. Our reaction from the screening at Comic-Con says:

"Over the course of its first two episodes, Undone asks the viewer to buy into two seemingly different shows. The first episode is a blend of domestic drama and wry comedy about an aimless young woman, her happier sister, her smothering mother, and the figment of a dead father who continues to figuratively haunt the family. It's a tough, honest show, one unafraid to cast its characters in an ugly light and wallow in their poor choices, practically daring you like them...and you do, because their baggage is so specific that it can't help but feel universal. The second episode is where the larger plot really kicks in, where that dead father haunting becomes literal, where the stripped-down presentation goes into hyperactive stylization, and where the melancholies and emotional burdens become literal."

The series certainly doesn't feel like something the producers of Bojack Horseman would create. Though the animated comedy series does tackle depression in a poignant and comedic way, Undone looks like something completely different. I think it's safe to say that we haven't seen a series like this in the streaming world at all, and it will be interesting to see if audiences pick up what it's putting down when the series hits Amazon on September 13, 2019.

Undone is a half-hour, genre-bending, animated series that explores the elastic nature of reality through its central character Alma, a twenty-eight-year-old living in San Antonio, Texas. After getting into a car accident and nearly dying, Alma finds she has a new relationship to time. She develops this new ability in order to find out the truth about her father's death.