Nobody would be surprised to hear a sentence as direct as the one that determines that the Spanish and the Italians are very similar. Not only because they share a common gastronomy or an affable Mediterranean character, nor because both countries have made history in media animation throughout this year (remember the unquestionable success of “Poor devil” on HBO). Unfortunately, the simile between us exposed by the graphic artist and illustrator Zero limestone (Michele Rech) and “This world will not make me a bad person”his new animated miniseries for Netflix, is more closely linked to the unstoppable rise of aggressive populism that has begun to conquer, without remission or detention, the most fickle minds of the average citizenry.
With a webseries perspective and narrated in the first person (as it already did in its pertinent prequel, “Cut along the dotted line” and in each of his graphic novels), the Italian cartoonist once again takes us to the hard core of precarious and peripheral neighborhood life, where a reception center for refugee families – and the respective desire for its closure, by the incipient Nazism that increasingly occupies more screen share – will become the spark of ignition of a plot that, little by little, will reveal its successive and complex layers. And it is that, what a priori seems to be a story willing to develop social empathy and portray the human borders that we draw in order to make life more difficult for others, ends up becoming a bitter reflection on maturity millennialdeconstruction and masculine revision, the deterioration of friendship and the dichotomy of capitalism.
A most intricate and delicate narrative line on which a proposal is based that is not exempt from fun and entertainment, since its weight and body are diluted thanks to the sustained inclusion of gags, hits of black humor, an exquisite soundtrack (with names as The Cure, The Clash, Oasis o Moderate) and references to pop culture that will arouse the attention and taste of those who already have gray hair. First of all, the appeal of Zerocalcare’s look and the arc raised in “This world will not make me a bad person” resides precisely in that familiarity and closeness with which it is so easy to identify and in his ability to encapsulate between irony and emotion all the evils associated with thirty. We all have a childhood friend with whom the only thing we have in common is now a mere bag of nostalgic and out-of-date anecdotes. We have all witnessed how the discourse of certain media “scare old” has poisoned the minds of many of our relatives. And of course, we have all sinned as moralists when it comes to trying to preach to them and lead them back to our ethical individualism. It will be precisely this dilemma that will shake the conscience of our protagonist, because after the return to the neighborhood of Cesare, the big guy who covered his back when they were children, we will be told, in flashback code and from a testimonial room, the facts that occurred in his neighborhood, planting the seed of doubt on the viewer and inviting us to devour their respective six episodes in order to learn more.
If we refer to the calendar, it is no coincidence that a story like that of “This world will not make me a bad person” has arrived just now, when we find ourselves at the gates of an electoral month marked by an embryonic slowdown in rights and progress and by the integration of fascism into our jargon. If, unlike Zero, you don’t have a fussy consciousness materialized in the form of an armadillo that knows how to stick your finger in the yaga and move when it’s called, at least we hope that the latest work of Michele Rech and the precision of his daring do manage to do it. .