10 Years Later, Over the Garden Wall Remains A Perfect Fall Treat
One of the best ways to commemorate the shifting seasons is with some timely entertainment: heaps of horror flicks for October, Planes, Trains and Automobiles for Thanksgiving, and It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and most recently, The Holdovers to bring in the holiday season. But of these many tales that help get in a festive mood, one of my personal favorites is Cartoon Network’s 10-part miniseries, Over the Garden Wall, an animated show released almost 10 years ago (November 3rd, 2014 to be precise) that mixes genres and styles into an autumnal delight.
The series centers on two siblings, Wirt and his younger brother Greg, who find themselves trapped in an Alice in Wonderland-style fantasy world called the Unknown. This is a realm of strange logic, 18th-early 19th-century American aesthetics, and lots of musical numbers. As the pair try to make their way home, they meet a cadre of oddballs who help or hinder them on their quest, as a mysterious monster known as The Beast closes in on their souls.
There are plenty of positive things to say about this well-crafted little show, but one of its most impressive strengths is how well it establishes dichotomies: between humor and horror, creepy and cute, and even between the siblings at the center of the story. While it doesn’t do anything that would outright jeopardize its family-friendly TV rating, it certainly pushes things to the line by functioning like an old-school fairytale, mostly in that the brothers constantly run into beings that want to kill them or worse. There’s a ghost that threatens to devour them, a witch that wants to replace their brains with wool, and a satanic being trying to trick them into eternal servitude. These are the kinds of dangerous figures one would find in classic folklore aimed at scaring the crap out of kids who otherwise may be liable to run around in the woods late at night or disobey their parents in any meaningful way.
But while the Unknown is defined by all manner of dangers, it’s just as often outright whimsical. As the boys come across steamboats filled with dapper frogs and tiny schools aimed at animal orphans, there’s a tendency to suddenly jump into song about “Potatoes and Molasses” or anything else. Most of the places they visit are inviting in that crisp fall woods sort of way, even if perils lurk therein. In general, the art style works across different aesthetics to help evoke these shifting tones—basically, it’s doing the previously mentioned creepy/cute thing. While these characters are bouncy and round, often inspired by early Disney cartoons, the background art looks like New England landscape paintings, as rich browns, deep oranges, and changing leaves put us in a specific time and place. It all creates this interesting dark fantasy pastiche inspired by Americana, nature, and Halloween harvest festival traditions that is disquieting and comforting in equal measure.
However, one of the series’ most impressive balancing acts is how it constantly peppers in gags without ruining its weighty atmosphere. The series is often downright hilarious, from how it layers on frightening imagery to the point of absurdity (i.e., the menacing pumpkin man with a knife) to the running bit where Greg cycles through so many names for his pet frog that he eventually ends up at American presidents. But instead of undercutting the tone, the gags work in concert with the show’s many other dichotomies, which lets it showcase how humor and horror are often two sides of the same coin.
A good example is an extended scene where it seems like Greg may have died and gone to the afterlife. He arrives in “Cloud City” and is greeted by a series of cherub-like welcoming committees, each serenading him with over-the-top enthusiasm in a scene that intentionally goes on a little too long. As Greg asks if there are more greeters, the camera abruptly cuts to and then slowly zooms in on an unsettling dog creature as nightmarish piano music plays. “Well, that’s enough,” the little brother says, only slightly disturbed.
In general, many of the best and silliest lines come from Greg, an agent of chaos who may be best defined by the fact he wears an upside-down tea kettle on his head for the entire series. For the most part, he’s borderline immune to being scared, approaching everything with the carefree demeanor of a little kid. By contrast, his older brother Wirt is a hot mess of adolescence who entirely lacks self-confidence and shirks almost all responsibility. One of the most impressive aspects of the series is how it commits to making him a flawed character with ample room to grow.
At first, Wirt is often downright mean to his goblin of a younger brother as he tries to pin everything on other people. Greg’s simple naivety is the perfect foil for his older sibling’s more complicated anxieties, and the emotional arc of the series is less about them literally finding a way out of this place and more about Wirt facing his flaws and accepting the increased responsibility that comes with growing up (and also Greg trying to think of a name for the frog). Basically, what it comes down to is that Over the Garden Wall doesn’t just tap into one element of fall but hits home all of the season’s emotional tenors: discomfort and snugness, warm color palettes and dying leaves, and then wraps this all in a well-conveyed coming-of-age arc.
At this point, the main thing holding the series back is something that seems to plague a lot of Cartoon Network shows these days: Warner Bros. leadership really hates cartoons. About a year ago, it was removed from Max, who owned the licensing rights, presumably because some algorithm told them that paying the residuals to keep it on would cost more than the “value” it generated. It seems to be the fate of basically every animated series on that platform, even ones like this, which previously won awards for the company. The show is still on Hulu, and you can buy it on Prime Video, but the physical releases are also out of print, which is quite a bummer.
Still, even though it was another victim of streaming services’ march towards enshittification, I feel fairly confident that Over the Garden Wall will live on beyond Max and whatever name they change it to next. Because if there’s something that people will probably always love doing, it’s commemorating the march of time with little traditions tied to a particular season. And considering how well this series taps into the many hues of fall, I don’t think even malpractice from entertainment executives can fully undercut this yearly rewatch ritual.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.
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