There are some people who have the innate ability to connect with other human beings, to touch the innermost strings of their soul, to get straight to their emotional trigger. It is a gift that the greats of communication, the empaths, those who investigate every little detail of themselves and others and can only live by putting their gift at the disposal of an art form.
Zerocalcare is one of these, one of those who speak the language of people with a disconcerting simplicity, clarity and truth. And the truth, even through drawings that move in front of a screen, is perceived in its entirety, it is craved as spectators, it is needed in narrative fiction as well as in life. And that’s how those few are enough characters we know already, Limestone, Sarah, Secco, the Armadillo, Alice and all those paranoia that we continue to have us, as well as the protagonist of this series, thirty years past, just the banality of everyday life, the bad luck of a day gone crooked, the descriptive peculiarity of the Roman accent, the awareness that in the end there is no answer to existential questions but there is only life itself and the warmth of the people around us. And that is enough to feel good.
Tear off along the edges it’s a simple, direct series, it’s like pop songs that seem to say nothing but then tell you everything you needed and there is not even the need to have a plot who knows how linear and coherent because life itself does not it does not have such a linear trend, after all, as Zerocalcare teaches us, it is only a dotted line to be torn along the edges that never leave a perfectly contoured shape. This series tells about life as it is, without meaning, without explanation, without coherence and reasonableness. Zerocalcare manages to entertain the public by wandering with mental ruminations to BoJack Horseman, drags him into his mind and makes him dialogue with his own self-destructive conscience and thoughts, amusing him with some stupid joke and then, the next moment, bringing him back into the deepest abyss. This series is an ups and downs of emotional peaks and passes from the typical “Roman” irony to moments of extreme seriousness that lead to reflect on the meaning of life.
The six episodes of Tear off along the edges they are also filled with an infinite number of citations to the pop culture of the 90s / 2000s and it becomes almost a mental exercise to try to find them all, from Tiziano Ferro to A mother as a friend, gives Handmaid’s Tale a How I Met Your Mother and for all those who have grown up over the years, the animated series of Zerocalcare becomes a journey through time, a romantic journey backwards but also a great comfort for the heart.
Here, Zerocalcare has the power to comfort people by staging that paranoid, insecure, envious, thoughtful, selfish part that usually no one ever wants to show of himself because it is considered something to be ashamed of. But the dark and “ugly” sides must be recognized and also shown. And this is how an animated series is enough to make us feel less alone because there is someone else, in some other place in the world, who is exactly like us, struggling with showing that they are outlining their life contours to perfection but then our eye falls on the paper and it is full of cracks. The edges torn by hand, however, even if you try to follow the dotted line, inevitably have some smudges so you might as well show them and treasure them.
Warm, welcoming, a little nostalgic, sometimes not very linear, the new animated series by Zerocalcare for Netflix can only convince even in its manufacturing defects because it shows life as it is, without a real meaning but with a human warmth with to warm up along the way and the beauty lies in this.
Rating: 8
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