Every animator creates a physically individual world, with its own topography and architecture and differently shaped characters. So when animators take on an established live-action genre, the result can feel both known and transformed.
Painterly backgrounds ground their reality. They perfectly embody the more or less normal people they represent — though, being characters in an extravagant fiction, they are not average. Created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, the series concerns a blue mushroom. The health industry, in this telling, is willing literally — rather than just incidentally — to kill to keep people sick.
Business has been bad. Harrington has a nice bit of throwaway business, distracting herself with Scotch tape; Copano we see in his underwear watching a samurai film and eating Chinese leftovers. But other, darker agents are employed by other, darker agencies. And so Marshall goes on the run, with a tortoise he brought back from Peru, intersecting with Frances as he goes.
Eventually, one would guess, they will be running together. There is some psychedelic weirdness when the mushrooms do their work, involving visions of little hairless creatures, but it is in most ways, in the four episodes available to review, a workaday world. Of course, things might get stranger later; this is Adult Swim , after all.
You know these characters without having to be told much about them. But while the story could conceivably be told with live actors in real settings, it would likely be so exaggerated, so satirical, that the human element, paradoxically, might get lost. Animation keeps it humble, believable and meaningful. This is all a function of good writing and underplayed acting; the mood is largely deadpan. And all the best thrillers are semi-comical, with heart. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
