Undone

Although so well-written you think you could get lost in it, the nagging uncanny valley in which it sits means you're always aware that you are watching something with artifice built in. But very quickly, the discomfort becomes part of the genius.

Transfixing and lushly beautiful. ... “Undone” has humor and story enough to make it more than an art object. ... It is magnificent art, a world opulently realized from its oil-painted backgrounds to its sound design. You don’t watch this show so much as fall into it. ... There’s no place like “Undone.”

To call Amazon's “Undone” a breathtaking piece of animation would be both to speak truly and to undervalue its strengths. To call it a complex, rich psychodramedy would be accurate and far from the complete picture. It is both, a perfect marriage of story and style, each half invaluable and impossible to divorce from the other. ... Grounded. Fantastical. A series worthy of deep examination, but which can be most accurately summed up in two words: Watch it.

Bold and gorgeous. ... Undone’s singularly captivating visual style is always in service of its deeply affecting story.

Together, the animation and the writing compliment each other to form a unique new form of television; one that’s easy to get caught up in, even when it stumbles a bit while explaining itself. “Undone” is a fascinating project to examine, but it’s also a very good, very human story, sans the flashy packaging.

Undone is one of the best shows of the year, an extraordinary union of style and substance. It's an awe-inspiring and impressive first series from Kate Purdy that establishes her as a major talent to watch.

Even when watching “Undone” is a deeply unnerving experience, it usually finds a way to twist its narrative, let its actors lean into their characters’ flaws, and reap unexpected rewards from often shattering revelations. There’s certainly no other show like it, which at this point is truly no small feat.

Undone fully integrates its genre elements and its hot topics—science vs. religion, biracial identity, contemporary sociopolitical malaise—into the story’s structure. ... Undone embraces a form of speculative storytelling that’s closer to mythology. Its rotoscoped world might be merely a fun-house mirror of reality, but if you’re brave enough to gaze into it, a mind-expanding adventure awaits.

Just like BoJack Horseman, Undone is about a person in a dark place trying to make sense of the world. As a portrait of an emotional breakdown so severe it causes reality itself to fracture it’s both disorientating and riveting.

Undone is a frequently beautiful and thought-provoking ride.

Undone gets more fascinating with each episode and avoids becoming too unwieldy by keeping those episodes tight, with runtimes clocking in at a just-right 23 minutes.

Undone is so consistently and intriguingly eye-popping as an advanced sensory experience that it's remarkably easy to forgive its failings on more simple narrative levels. ... The potential is still there. For now, there's so much that works here that I've made quick peace with the fact that this is a whodunit in which the answer doesn't yet matter to me at all.

Undone can be beautiful and inventive, but rather than directly confront such concerns, it mostly just kicks each can of worms a little further down the road, to perhaps be addressed in a future season while it continues to use the question of Alma’s sanity as a story hook.

A fascinating adult animated fantasy that's anything but a cartoon. [16-29 Sep 2019, p.25]

Undone is ambitious to a fault, beautiful as all get-out, but more enjoyable when its focus doesn’t stray too far from its great lead performance.