From Sci-Fi to Suburban: Exploring the Visual Style of Solar Opposites

 The Hulu original Solar Opposites provides viewers with a comedic experience of four aliens, stuck on the planet Earth after crash landing and their hijinks as they adapt to the culture. Following the setup of popular television sitcoms, they pose as a family in the suburbs. They own a house, send the youngest to school, interact with neighbors and attempt to fit in. But Solar Opposites lures you in with this simple presentation, the visual style of the show draws from its story, in a way only an animated show could.

Solar Opposites uses a basic visual style, its common to successful sitcoms and animated television shows such as The Simpson and Family Guy. Set in Geenadavisville, a suburban American town, within a normal neighborhood, with a house and neighbors and white picket fences, it presents the American dream. But, that dream is part of the illusion. Style elements break that dream as if Solar Opposites, is pointing out a failed part of America. The spaceship crashed on the roof, covered in tarps and broken parts is the first mise en scène element that breaks the sitcom look. It represents the show’s basic premise, while also showing a damaged cookie cutter American home. On the inside we initially get those normally expected living rooms and bedrooms, decorated in what a viewing audience comes to expect, a TV, a couch, rugs on the floor, and beds. But upon closer inspection the angles used by Solar Opposites present these rooms is different, doppelganger way. Sitcoms normally show the family couch from the perspective of the TV, facing the family as they gather. The Sholorpian’s living room filmed from the left side, giving viewers a different alien view.

As the audience spends time in the house, the truth unfolds seeing more telltale signs of the alien and weird. From a confused man cave in the episode “Patricia Automated Television-In-Action,” to the giant ant-farm like hidden wall introduced at the end of the pilot. These elements are almost perverse versions of the human norm, further exemplifying how alien and different the cast of Solar Opposites is and that they are not one of us. The “Lavatic Reactor” episode is another that shows this two-sided style in play, it starts with Korvo and Terry going to college, Korvo looking sterile and different in his alien suit, while Terry dresses like a character from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. But, in a bid to fit in, Terry uses alien technology to decrease Korvo’s intellect, making him play along and be a party frat boy. As the partying intensifies eventually moving from the college to the house, the antics resemble scenes expected in Animal House, Van Wilder or Old School. The party moves to the alien ship changing the style and allowing the party goers to break the Lavatic reactor resulting in disaster.

The wall, which starts as a small side aspect also shows how Solar Opposites uses its story to influence the style. At the end of the pilot, we see Yumyulack place the shrunken janitor in a giant ant farm like hidden wall in the kids’ bedroom. As the season progresses we see that the Wall takes on a life of its own. Inside the Wall, first shown from Tim’s perspective, is a post-apocalyptic style world, driven in part by the serial style story driving these sections. The episode “Terry and Korvo Steal a Bear” the seventh episode of the first season fully moves into the wall with the alien’s taking the back seat.

While the Wall is normally a minor sub plot, when seen in the episodes it offers massive changes to the show’s mise en scène. Separated by levels, the visual depiction of these floors offer a clear representation of how the Wall and its people coexist. The lower wall is dark, dirty, rougher around the edges, like a dark wasteland found in The Road Warrior with violence possible at every turn The middle levels are brighter, more cohesive like a medieval trade town, with markets and goods for trade, sunlight can be seen, and it is the start of the safer floors. The highest floors of the wall show Roman inspired architecture, clean, with an expensive cosmopolitan feeling, which reinforces where the rich and ruling caste live and sit in the hierarchy. The clothing worn by the people of the Wall, correspond to each floor, wild biker looking clothes, with shaved heads bare chests on the lower levels, more feudal peasant and farmer looks on the middle level such as Steven and his rat Molly introduced in episode seven. The Duke and the rich on the higher levels look like aristocrats and politicians, while even the followers of the church of Jesse adopt nun like clothing in colors worn by her. The Wall uses these stylistic looks develop the caste system used by the narrative to move the sub plot along.

Solar Opposites takes its sitcom style, and introduces the alien, to the American dream. The weird and alien is penetrating cracks in something most consider broken and unattainable. But it also does something new, basing part of its story on the mise en scène at the heart of its plot. The show excels at having layers, the normal, the alien and the hidden, these layers offer specific styles driving their differences and influencing their storylines. But these differences are at the heart of the story developing in Solar Opposites which is striving for a cohesive show.

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(Credits: Scribe/Social Media Manger: Charles Tucker ; Writer: Manuel Alvarez; Photo/Video Editor: Brody Bush ; Producer: Hunter Degioanni.)