Drawn

The performance relies entirely on audio from her sets at the Largo in Los Angeles, which is matched to a patchwork of animation styles. It’s a risk that works because her pacing is famously deliberate, giving the animators at Six Point Harness plenty of silence and vocal shifts to play with. When she recounts proposing to her wife Stephanie Allynne while suffering from internal bleeding and perched on a hospital bedpan, the animation takes a potentially grim medical nightmare and turns it into a vivid, weirdly sweet cartoon.

The HBO special, released in July 2021, arrived at a busy moment in Notaro’s career. She had just finished digitally replacing another actor in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead and was recurring on Star Trek: Discovery. Because the pandemic had kept her off physical stages, director Greg Franklin helped her construct this set from roughly 48 hours of recorded audio compiled from her regular shows at the Largo.

Rather than sticking to a single visual style, the special jumps between claymation, classic Sunday-strip caricatures, and surreal sketches. The medium allows Notaro to fully visualize her off-the-wall hypotheticals, like a breakdown of the gender-neutral anatomy of the Kool-Aid Man or her drug-addled state following a wisdom tooth extraction. It is a looser, sillier outing than her career-defining 2012 set, concluding with a chaotic, Dolly Parton-soundtracked road trip that the animation is able to push into pure absurdity.