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.