'Undone' Featurette: Go Behind The Scenes Of The Mind-Bending Rotoscope Animation Process

There's a stigma among the general public that animation is meant for family friendly content. But animation isn't a genre, it's a medium, and it's a tool that can be used to tell some very mature, probing, and powerful stories. Amazon will soon set out to prove that with their latest series.

Undone is a psychological drama following Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel) as 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. If that sounds trippy, just wait until you watch the Undone featurette that shows off the impressive rotoscope animation process that brings the show to life.

For those who don't know, rotoscope animation is created by tracing and painting over live-action footage that was shot with a real camera. This method has been used with films like A Scanner Darkly, but with Undone, it's being used with a variety of other tools to create a visually stunning, mind-bending experience.

The unique look of the animation can be credited to Hisko Hulsing (Montage of Heck) and Amsterdam-based animation studio Submarine. The rotoscope animation specifically is being handled by the same crew that made A Scanner Darkly by way of the Austin-based Minnow Mountain and co-producer Craig Staggs.

The Undone featurette shows how performances for the series are shot in a minimalist space without fully realized set. Instead, the sets are created as digital 3D paintings that are combined with footage of the actors. This allows for seamless and easy manipulation of the environments for some of the more surreal and otherworldly sequences that might otherwise cost significantly more to create if the movie was your average live-action project.

The more I see from this series, the more I feel compelled to watch it when the series debuts on Amazon next week. Our own Jacob Hall has been over the moon for this series since seeing some of it at San Diego Comic-Con this summer. You can read his full reaction to the series right here.

Undone also stars Bob Odenkirk, Angelique Cabral, Constance Marie, Siddarth Dhananjay and Daveed Diggs with John Corbett, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Nicholas Gonzalez, Sheila Vand and Tyler Posey appearing as guest stars.

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.

Undone arrives on Amazon Prime Video starting on September 13, 2019.