Over the Garden Wall: A Masterpiece

When I first began watching Cartoon Network's Over the Garden Wall, I was skeptical to say the least. It seemed oddly condescending to watch a cartoon intended for kids half my age, and it felt strange that it was broken up into ten-ten minute episodes - as though they were subliminally hinting at the short attention spans of their audience. However, as soon as I watched the first episode, I was enamored by the technical brilliance, compelling characters, and complex narrative, the latter of which, like any stellar drama, exists on multiple strata simultaneously. If I could make one movie/show recommendation this Halloween week, Over the Garden Wall would be it.

Starting with the technical aspects - Over the Garden Wall has crisp, playful animation which captures its cutesy characters just as well as it paints its macabre scenery. The character designs are also very unique, with an older brother who has a wizard's hat on and a younger brother carrying a frog and wearing a teapot on his head. The voice acting is superb, led by Elijah Wood, playing the older brother Wirt, and a supporting cast full of stars like Christopher Lloyd, Samuel Ramey, John Cleese, Tim Curry, Cole Sanchez, and Bebe Neuwirth, among others.

And the music... the music for Over the Garden Wall has no right being as great as it is. In fact, though the soundtrack is the only album by the artists, The Blasting Company, they have soared to my sixth most-listened to artist of all time on Spotify. The soundtrack has everything from opera, to jazz, to country, to EDM, to piano/vocal duets and even some soft rock, to name but a few. It's 40 songs long, but each song averages around 1.5 minutes, so the whole thing doesn't even last an hour. I'd go so far as to recommend the album in and of itself simply as a great listen. Here's a few of my favorite songs:

1. Patient is the Night (piano/vocal)
2. Into the Unknown (piano/vocal)
3. Over the Garden Wall (band/vocal)
4. Old Black Train (country)
5. The Fight is Over (soft rock)

Honorable Mentions: Tiny Star, Send Me a Peach, and Ms. Langtree's Lament

These eight songs are less than fifteen minutes long, give or take a couple minutes, and they're all beautiful in their own way, with lyrics like "Dancing in a swirl/ Of golden memories/ the loviest... lies of all..." (Into the Unknown), which speaks to the hopeless proclivity shared by all humans to get trapped in nostalgia from our childhoods.  

I won't go into detail on the plot of Over the Garden Wall, because I wish everyone who reads this to drop whatever they're doing and watch it as soon as they can, but the story follows two half-brothers, the elder named Wirt, and the younger named Greg, as they try to find their way home through the eerie woods called The Unknown, haunted by The Beast. Along the way, they stumble from one beautiful set piece to another, and meet a plethora of unique and interesting characters, all of whom have different and sometimes conflicting advice for the travelers.

While the plot is certainly interesting on its own at a surface level, there are four things which catapult it from being a cool, creepy cartoon to a diamond in the rough: First, the character driven story. Second, the excellent use of foreshadowing. Third, the beautiful scenery, and finally, the many philosophical questions posed by Over the Garden Wall.

I've said before that all great stories are character driven, and nowhere is that more instantiated than in Over the Garden Wall. The half-brothers are unique and dynamic on their own, but come together, with a certain talking bluebird, to make a powerful combination of individuals, each of whom have equally interesting arcs. Greg, the younger half-brother, is hopelessly naïve and acts rashly, often to the dismay of his elder sibling. Wirt, who we can presume to be somewhere in the early high school years, overanalyzes every interaction and often finds himself lost to the complexity of his decisions. He tries to be a good leader and get himself and his half-brother home, but it seems that everything he does leads them further and further astray. Wirt is also constantly frustrated with Greg's antics, which leads to intriguing conflict which seems to be felt by Wirt only, as Greg still believes in the purity of their relationship. I won't discuss the aforementioned bluebird out of fears of spoiling the story, but her own actions are as complex as can be. Each character is fully able to act independently of the other, making them dynamic and that much more compelling.

Foreshadowing can be a fickle friend to writers. On the one hand, it provides unparalleled hyperlinking within a story, and makes events more powerful when they occur because they were hinted at earlier. However, it can easily be overdone, leading to anticlimactic moments, or even frustrating situations where something deeply foreshadowed does not occur in the same way it was pictured by the audience. Over the Garden Wall makes excellent use of foreshadowing from its opening frames and song. Every moment seems to foreshadow another, leading to a complex network of setups and payoffs. Coupled with the already sinister tone of many of the episodes, the deep foreshadowing, gentle and yet ever-present, always feels perfect. In fact, even having watching it multiple times now, I still catch little bits of foreshadowing in the early episodes. 

The scenery of Over the Garden Wall is flawless. It captures the solemn fire of New England autumn in its first episodes and the fearful desolation of early winter in its last. As the seasons change, the animations do as well, leading to a cohesive experience. Each unique setting carries with it a different piece of lost nostalgia - sometimes even nostalgia for something I've never experienced, like taking refuge in an old tavern during a thunderstorm, or the opulence of 19th century manors. There is in fact no English word for experiencing that form of nostalgia, but there is a word in Welsh which captures it well: Hiraeth - longing for a place to which you cannot return.

Last but certainly not least, Over the Garden Wall poses many philosophical questions which I'll analyze with greater depth in other posts. One of the largest questions deals with the perception of reality vs reality itself in the literal sense - not in the moral subjectivism vs. objectivism argument, but quite literally the disconnect between how we perceive the world around us and how it actually is (if it even is). Another central theme is the role of responsibility and its relationship to meaning. I also found it interesting how Over the Garden Wall constantly subverts expectations, leading to the question: what forms our expectations? There is in fact another key part to Over the Garden Wall that I'm purposefully leaving out because it's a spoiler, but it too is an essential aspect of the philosophy of the show, and I'd go so far as to say it's the main theme of the tale. Of course, that specific question will be analyzed in its own post.

Over the Garden Wall is a show which bleeds passion in every frame. Not only does it have great animation which brings nostalgic scenes to life, and great voice acting which brings the characters themselves to life, but it's got more philosophical depth than any cartoon I've seen before. Even the episodes which I feel are the most lackluster still have some depth to them, and while there are of course juvenile moments designed to entertain the younger audience the show was originally intended for, there are also moments in which I question how this series was marketed to children. It's not that the show is overtly horrifying - there aren't any jump scares or particularly frightening imagery (macabre ≠ frightening), but there is a ghostly tone for the entirety of the show which I find to be a refreshing break from traditional horror. Over the Garden Wall isn't traditionally scary, but its implications and themes are terrifying. This Halloween week, there isn't a show I'd recommend more than this ten part miniseries available on Hulu. In totality, it's only 110 minutes long - the length of a moderately long film, and every one of those minutes is beautiful.