“Where are we?” asks Wirt, voiced with melodramatic angst by Elijah Wood, in the show’s opening scene. Few, if any, of us can identify with this modest way of life, but through its connections to the fairytales we grew up with it feels personal, intimate – nostalgic. Its final effect is flawless, conjuring romantic images of simpler times, a stark contrast to the antiseptic brightness of modern day. Look closely at the lighting at the mercy of the forest around them, Wirt, Greg, and their surroundings are lit only with candles or torches as the Autumn sun is quick to leave them in darkness as they continue in their search for home. These influences manifest in Over the Garden Wall’s characters and backgrounds – full of clean lines and earthy tones, but go deeper still. New England landscapes, Victorian chromolithography, and vintage Halloween postcards all influenced the show’s design and consequently create an otherness that is unconsciously familiar. It doesn’t blend modern buildings or structures into its world, instead it creates something that Sean Edgar describes as “both timeless and unique” in The Art of Over the Garden Wall. The show’s traditional elements are supported by an old-fashioned aesthetic that further rejects postmodernist trends. It subverts subversion and tells a tale to match the Brothers Grimm. These stories lean into subjects darker than you would expect to one day see on Cartoon Network, but Over the Garden Wall was unafraid to delve into themes of prejudice, ephemerality, and death. While postmodern folktales reject the beautiful simplicity and familiarity of traditional folklore in order to achieve their effect, Over the Garden Wall rejects postmodernist trends instead embracing folkloric tropes to effectively weave a complex thread of themes that is unique and yet uncannily familiar. More recently this was done in Netflix’s Disenchantment, where the typical princess lead is more comfortable downing pints than doting on princes. Consider Dreamworks’ Shrek it’s an adventure-comedy where both the adventure and the comedy only work because it upturns everything you might expect of a fairytale. For better or worse, many shows rely on the subversion of mainstream conventions regarding narrative, characterisation, or design to tell their stories. So, is that why Over the Garden Wall feels so familiar – or does it go deeper, exploring why it is that we love a good folk tale? The story and setting are immediately evocative of folktales which in turn creates one level of nostalgia, although for most people, their interactions with folklore are mediated through other animation as stories from writers such as Hans Christian Anderson fall into public domain. Searching for the way home, they meet an assortment of weird and wonderful characters, fall into impossibly absurd situations, and are unknowingly stalked by the terrible Beast that lurks in the darkness. The series follows the journey of Greg and Wirt who find themselves lost in a place known only as the Unknown. Cartoons like Patrick McHale’s miniseries Over the Garden Wall.Ī favourite of so many cartoon-fans, this 2014 series manages to achieve something I have seen few within the genre do: it evokes nostalgia on your very first watch. But some cartoons manage to cross these boundaries. Sometimes, it offers us a safe-space to explore our fears and to meet the monsters that were once terrifying and now, within this animated environment, fascinating. Blissfully unaware of the existential horrors waiting to scare us as the years go by, instead we watch cartoons.Īs adults, many of us turn back to cartoons. We are too busy clutching at teddy-bears, wondering about the monsters under our beds and being scared of the dark. We spend our lives dipping into a state of fear fear of the past, fear of the future, fear of the unknown.
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