Over The Garden Wall

[Tiny Prancer]

I marathoned it on sunday with a friend and oh my god what an amazing series. There's so much about it that's gorgeous, from the visual design to the music, and it hits on so many notes of fairytales and folk tales and period films and old animation and ghost stories and it's just a gorgeous package of an animated miniseries.

the full series is available on itunes and I think you can stream it on the cartoon network site, but it's probably limited to people in the US. I'm sure there's torrents too. Here's the first chapter, to give you a taste (once again if it's unavailable outside of the US I am so very sorry):

They also have a bunch of the music from the series available to listen to as well, and I'm eagerly anticipating a full soundtrack release.

[TheCrawlingChaos]

My thoughts after blasting through all of it, in no particular order:

- SPOILERS -

• While "it was all a dream/near death experience, or was it?" obviously isn't the most unique or creative way to end a show, at least it was a) done well and b) at the end of a good enough show that I didn't mind. Also, the last couple episodes worth of Greg giving himself up to the beast and then Wirt being willing to give himself back to reverse that kind of reminded me of Supernatural. Only with much younger, much smarter brothers.
• The Potatoes and Molasses song will never not be stuck in my head ever again.
• I liked that Beatrice and Wirt's relationship didn't turn into a "I'm hung up on this initial girl but you're obviously the girl I should be with" thing, while still remaining friends and helping each other out (as far as that went.)
• Similarly, I was glad that Wirt's school acquaintances were all just completely normal, chill teenagers who weren't in any way bullies or out to get him. I was bracing myself for his ostensible romantic rival whose name I forget to be an obnoxious jock who he has to prove himself better than, but what really happened was so much better.
• The art kind of made me think of some kind of freaky three-way collaboration between Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak and Pendleton Ward. I can't think of a design decision I didn't like, and the Beast gave me legit goosebumps for all .5 seconds he was illuminated.
• I may or may not have cried a little at the end when the Woodsman reunited with his daughter. That arc was so well-done, especially the fact that the Beast was lying to him the whole time and was just that persuasive.
• I'm still not 100% sure what the deal was with the black turtles--were they some kind of manifestation of the Beast himself? They were cool, but I'm still not sure why they were i every episode.

Apparently there's no follow-up in the works, which on the one hand makes me really sad but on the other makes me hold out hope that they'll just leave a good thing alone.

[Tiny Prancer]

I think the deal with the turtles is that they have some sort of property relating to the edelwood tree oil or something. That's my guess, anyway.

The Pendleton Ward comparison is a pretty accurate one, since the series creator is someone who worked on Adventure Time and Pendleton Ward was the one who animated the fantastic Cab Calloway moment of the Highwayman's song. (plus as someone who has a complete Beatrix Potter book collection stashed away in my closet, I really enjoyed the ambiguity of if the animal schoolchildren were actually able to understand what was going on or not, since Potter's books tend to have very strange treatments of how much the animals in them are actually "people".)

I think they wrapped things up in a way that it would make doing a sequel series really unuseful, unless they did episodes that are supposed to happen in the earlier timeframe of the show (on the way to Adelaide) or without Wirt and Greg present, but it's also very unlikely that would get greenlit. I would love to see the original pilot animation though, since it doesn't seem to be available anywhere. (maybe they'll make it a special feature on a DVD release or something).

Also, a really interesting thing to do after finishing the series is to rewatch the opening sequence in the first episode in comparison to the closing at the last, because there's some very interesting bookends between them that you won't understand until you've finished the series.

[Mister Smalls]

I don't really have anything to add to this except that I agree it was fantastic.

[EYE OF ZA]

The songs in it are absolutely great.  I actually don't think the song that seems popular with most people (Potatoes and Molasses) was the one that stuck with me most.  There's a lot of good songs of varying styles, but they're all done appropriately and fit in well with the scenes.  I really want the festival song that plays when they're in Pottsville.

There's a lot of places where things could have gone worse but didn't, and that was really nice too.  Greg could have been a lot more annoying than he was, and I wasn't that into the stuff that started coming up in the next to last episode, but in the end Greg managed to be likable and naive and the stuff managed to conclude itself without being a detriment to the rest of the story.

Yesterday, someone told me I needed to see it, and we sat down and watched it with a bunch of people.  One of them was complaining that it was scary, but it was a good sort of scary, where things are eerie and slightly uncomfortable at times.  Other times, you're on a ferryboat full of frogs dressed up like they're in the Mark Twain episode of Star Trek TNG.