is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
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.
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