Women Wearing Shoulder Pads’ creators did it for the culture

Imagine if George Cukor Women was a modern telenovela and in Spanish taking place in Ecuador rather than in a dramatic of 1939 on the life of the rich Manhattanites. Now imagine if the series was led by Pedro Almodóvar and its characters were animated with a stop-motion animation instead of being represented by Hollywood heavy goods vehicles like Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer. Now think about the transgressive of this spectacle if it treated queerness as the norm and told a politically busy story on the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. This show would look a lot like adult swimming Women wearing shoulders.

When I recently sat with Women wearing shoulders The creator Gonzalo Cordova and the co -cinema co -founders Fantasma Arturo and Roy Ambriz, they told me that they saw Women wearing shoulders as an opportunity to explore the Latin American identity in all its complexity. For all its stupidity, they wanted the spectacle to feel like a thoughtful representation of what life in South America can look like. And to do that, they knew it was important to Women wearing shoulders Take almost completely in Spanish – a first for adults swimming.

“There would have been a little phoniness to tell this story in English,” said Cordova. “It would have felt a capitulation in the larger forces of marketing, and my work as an artist is to do everything I can to fight against these forces. It is the studio’s work to repel against me, and this dynamic Push-Pull can be what makes things interesting. ”

Women wearing shoulders tells the story of Mariketa Negocios (Pepa Pallarés), a ruthless entrepreneur from Spain who has built a dazzling life in Quito, the capital of the equator. Almost all those who live in Quito think of Cuyes (the Spanish Ecuadorian word for guinea pigs) as a traditional delicacy that is part of their culture, but Mariketa sees fur rodents as pets. Mariketa knows that the tank of the marketing of cuyes as foodstuffs would be a hard blow against its longtime rival, the Cuy Doña Qoisse (Laura Torres) meat. And even if the Mariketa plan would harm the means of subsistence of her Espada lover (Kerygma Flores) – a woman who fights Cuyes like a slider in massive stadiums – all this is worth it in the eyes of the Spanish because it prioritizes its own desires above anyone else.

There is a sharp absurdity to each of the episodes which gives the impression of being a classic series of swimming for adults. The characters frequently burst into the song, Nina Gallavants around Quito riding a giant like a horse, and many close plans of the series are in fact cottons towards living actors. But there is also a cinematic extravagance and a cultural specificity Women wearing shoulders This distinguishes it from previous projects in stop-motion of adult Swim.

Cordova’s insistence that Women wearing shoulders needed to be as authentically Latin American as ridiculous was one of what excited the Ambriz brothers. The duo – whose work is generally more supernatural – knew that the animation of a more anchored series would present a unique set of challenges. But Cordova’s vision for a story that has not tracked down to be Latin America as a intrinsically negative thing spoke deeply with them. “We are all so used to seeing the Hispanics represented through the eyes of people who do not live in Latin America, and often there are nuances that are simply not represented as they should be,” said Roy.

As a life of life from the films of Almodóvar, Cordova has always wanted Women wearing shoulders feel like an increased tribute to Volver Style of narrative signature of the director. Cordova told me that, while Women wearing shoulders Do not try to be a parody of Almodóvar, it is a comedy which forced him to “exaggerate each element of the story a little to see what is happening”. This approach to making humor is one of the main reasons why the series is so strongly focused on the lives of female characters, and why all their romantic relationships are explicitly queer.

“With the films of Almodóvar, even when filled with straight characters, these are always very queer stories, and it was important for me to preserve this energy while finding a unique way of expressing it,” said Cordova. “In a way, you forget the male characters, and we wanted to amplify this feeling. But the second where you do this in the context of a romantic melodrama, you really have only one choice, that is to say to make each gay character in one way or another.”

In Cordova, the real joke in the center of Women wearing shoulders is how technically the series is ambitious. At one point, he had planned to use puppet puppets rather than stopping the movement. But he found that working in animation allowed him and the rest of the production team a freedom of creation.

“I did things live before where I dreamed of putting the camera on the ceiling and shooting the characters that cross the play in this way, but it was the first time that I could do that kind of thing,” said Cordova. “And with Marionettes, part of the joke would have been their inability to fully express this type of melodrama, and I think the spectacle would have been worse for this joke to be so obvious.”

The Ambriz brothers explained to me that the creation of dynamic and dynamic cameras movements is one of the most delicate parts of the stop-motion production process. Cordova also envisaged the series putting more emphasis on dramatic lighting and shadows, which are also difficult to succeed in this medium. And many of the more involved sequences in the series have forced the Fantasma cinema team to create much more individualized crafts than normal.

“From the start, Gonzalo was very clear that this show needed a high concept approach to his cinematography – not only in terms of camera movements, but also the way he orchestrated the movements of the characters through the scenes,” said Arturo. “It’s easy when things are standardized and you only have three sets, four puppets, 10 accessories, two cameras configurations and two lighting configurations, but on this show, absolutely each plan was unique.”

This dedication to crafts is becoming more and more obvious as Women wearing shoulders Ajoilates to his final of season 1, which puts a period on a chapter of the life of Mariketa. But Cordova is open to the possibility of revisiting this world, although under a variety of new perspectives. The world is only but so large, however, and some characters could appear again.

“This show is called Women wearing shouldersAnd this is my intention for each season of really, really, really getting involved, “said Cordova.” There will be different women that we will meet and different stories that we will tell with characters that come back. The intention is that it is not quite a series of anthology, but I would like to build it so that each season can look at yourself and enjoy it like its own thing. »»

The next episode of Women wearing shoulders First this Sunday on Adult Swim, and the whole season will be broadcast as a special feature film on HBO Max on September 29.