Imagine if George Cukor’s The Women was a modern, Spanish-language telenovela set in Ecuador rather than a 1939 dramedy about the lives of wealthy Manhattanites. Now imagine if the series was directed by Pedro Almodóvar and its characters were brought to life with stop-motion animation instead of being portrayed by Hollywood heavyweights like Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer. Now, think about how transgressive that show would be if it treated queerness as the norm and told a politically charged story about the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. That show would be a lot like Adult Swim’s Women Wearing Shoulder Pads.
When I recently sat down with Women Wearing Shoulder Pads creator Gonzalo Cordova and Cinema Fantasma cofounders Arturo and Roy Ambriz, they told me that they see Women Wearing Shoulder Pads as an opportunity to explore Latin American identity in all of its complexity. For all of its silliness, they wanted the show to feel like a thoughtful depiction of what life in South America can feel like. And to do that, they knew it was important for Women Wearing Shoulder Pads to unfold almost completely in Spanish — a first for Adult Swim.
“There would have been a little bit of a phoniness to telling this story in English,” Cordova explained. “It would have felt like a capitulation to the larger forces of marketability, and my job as an artist is to do everything I can to fight against those forces. It’s the studio’s job to push back against me, and that push-pull dynamic can be what makes things interesting.”
Women Wearing Shoulder Pads tells the tale of Marioneta Negocios (Pepa Pallarés), a ruthless entrepreneur from Spain who has built a dazzling life for herself in Quito, Ecuador’s capital. Most everyone living in Quito thinks of cuyes (the Ecuadorian Spanish word for guinea pigs) as a traditional delicacy that is part of their culture, but Marioneta sees the furry rodents as pets. Marioneta knows that tanking the cuyes’ marketability as foodstuffs would be a huge blow against her longtime rival, cuy meat magnate Doña Quispe (Laura Torres). And even though Marioneta’s plan would harm the livelihood of her on-again / off-again lover Espada (Kerygma Flores) — a woman who fights cuyes like a bullfighter in massive stadiums — it’s all worth it in the Spaniard’s eyes because she prioritizes her own desires above anyone else’s.
There’s a pointed absurdity to each of the episodes that makes it feel like a classic Adult Swim series. Characters frequently burst into song, Nina gallavants around Quito riding a giant cuy like a horse, and many of the show’s close-up shots are actually cutaways to living actors. But there is also a cinematic extravagance and cultural specificity to Women Wearing Shoulder Pads that sets it apart from Adult Swim’s previous stop-motion projects.
Cordova’s insistence that Women Wearing Shoulder Pads needed to be as authentically Latin American as it is ridiculous was part of what excited the Ambriz brothers. The duo — whose work typically skews more supernatural — knew that animating a more grounded series would present a unique set of challenges. But Cordova’s vision for a story that did not frame being from Latin America as an inherently negative thing spoke to both of them deeply. “We are all so used to seeing Hispanic people represented through the eyes of people who don’t live in Latin America, and oftentimes there are nuances that just aren’t depicted the way they should be,” Roy told me.
As a lifelong lover of Almodóvar’s films, Cordova always wanted Women Wearing Shoulder Pads to feel like a heightened tribute to the Volver director’s signature storytelling style. Cordova told me that, while Women Wearing Shoulder Pads isn’t trying to be an Almodóvar parody, it is a comedy, which required him to “exaggerate every element of the story just a little bit to see what happens.” That approach to crafting humor is one of main reasons why the series is so keenly focused on the lives of female characters, and why all of their romantic relationships are explicitly queer.
“With Almodóvar’s films, even when they’re filled with straight characters, they are still very queer stories, and it was important to me that we preserve that energy while finding a unique way to express it,” Cordova said. “You kind of forget about the male characters, and we wanted to amplify that feeling. But the second you do that within the context of a romantic melodrama, you really only have one choice left, which is to make every single character gay in some way.”
To Cordova, the real joke at the center of Women Wearing Shoulder Pads is how technically ambitious the series is. At one point, he’d considered using puppeted marionettes as opposed to stop motion. But he found that working in animation afforded him and the rest of the production team much more creative freedom.
“I’ve made live-action things before where I’d dreamt of putting the camera in the ceiling and shooting the characters walking across the room that way, but this was the first time that I could actually do that kind of stuff,” Cordova said. “And with marionettes, part of the joke would have been their inability to fully express this kind of melodrama, and I think the show would have been worse for having that joke be so obvious.”
The Ambriz brothers explained to me that creating fluid, dynamic camera movements is one of the trickiest parts of the stop-motion production process. Cordova also envisioned the series putting extra emphasis on dramatic lighting and shadows, which are similarly hard to pull off well in this medium. And many of the series’ more involved sequences required the Cinema Fantasma team to craft far more individualized, handcrafted shots than normal.
”From the beginning, Gonzalo was very clear that this show needed a high-concept approach to its cinematography — not just in terms of the camera’s movements, but also in the way in which he orchestrated the characters’ movements through scenes,“Arturo said. “It’s easy when things are standardized and you only have three sets, four puppets, 10 props, two camera setups, and two lighting setups, but on this show, absolutely every shot was unique.”
That dedication to craft becomes increasingly apparent as Women Wearing Shoulder Pads builds to its season 1 finale, which puts a period on one chapter of Marioneta’s life. But Cordova is open to the possibility of revisiting this world, albeit from a variety of new perspectives. The world’s only but so big, however, and certain characters could pop up again.
“This show is called Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, and it is my intention for every season to really, really commit to that,” Cordova said. “There will be different women we will meet and different stories that we would tell with returning characters coming back. The intent is that it’s not quite an anthology series, but I would want to build it so every season you can kinda watch on its own and enjoy it as its own thing.”
The next episode of Women Wearing Shoulder Pads premieres this Sunday on Adult Swim, and the entire season will air as a feature-length special on HBO Max on September 29th.
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