In a recent conversation with Women Wearing Shoulder Pads creator Gonzalo Cordova and Cinema Fantasma co-founders Arturo and Roy Ambriz, they shared that the show serves as a platform to delve into the intricate layers of Latin American identity. Despite its comedic elements, they aimed for the series to provide a thoughtful representation of life in South America. To achieve this, they decided Women Wearing Shoulder Pads would primarily unfold in Spanish — marking a pioneering move for Adult Swim.

Cordova elaborated, “Narrating this story in English would have felt inauthentic. It would seem like yielding to broader market influences, and my role as an artist is to resist those forces. The studio must challenge me, and this push-pull can birth intriguing results.”

Women Wearing Shoulder Pads chronicles the story of Marioneta Negocios (Pepa Pallarés), a driven businesswoman from Spain who forges a glamorous existence in Quito, Ecuador. Though most Quito residents consider cuyes (guinea pigs in Ecuadorian Spanish) a cultural delicacy, Marioneta regards them as pets. Undermining the culinary market for cuyes would deal a significant blow to her long-time adversary, cuy meat mogul Doña Quispe (Laura Torres). Despite her plan potentially impacting her on-again, off-again lover Espada (Kerygma Flores) — a woman who fights cuyes in grand arenas — Marioneta remains unperturbed, prioritizing her ambitions above all else.

The episodes exude a sharp absurdity reminiscent of classic Adult Swim fare. Characters frequently erupt into song, Nina roams Quito astride a massive cuy, and numerous close-ups transition to live-action cutaways. Yet, Women Wearing Shoulder Pads distinguishes itself from former Adult Swim stop-motion offerings through its cinematic flair and cultural depth.

Cordova’s determination to present Women Wearing Shoulder Pads as authentically Latin American while being delightfully absurd captivated the Ambriz brothers. Typically known for their supernatural-themed work, they recognized that animating a more realistic series posed distinctive challenges. However, Cordova’s vision of showcasing Latin American origins positively resonated deeply with them. “We often see Hispanic people depicted through perspectives of those outside Latin America, missing important nuances,” Roy expressed.

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.