Half-brothers Wirt (voice of Elijah Wood) and Greg (v/o Collin Dean) (and a big frog that Greg found) find themselves deep within a spooky forest. Wirt isn’t sure how they got so lost and the much younger Greg is pretty much oblivious, but they need to get home. Their travels see them running into a sinister woodsman in black (v/o Christopher Lloyd) who wanders in the dark looking for Edelwood trees; a gnarled tree which grows in a manner that its bark resembles a face. He fells them and uses their wood to make a black viscous oil for his lantern, so he can go out and look for more trees to produce more oil, and so on in a cyclical fashion, because the lamp must not, under any circumstances, go out. He warns them that the woods are home to a terrible beast which preys on the lost; when they fall into despair, they are his. Fortunately, while working their way towards apparent civilisation (but not as they know it), Greg finds and rescues a talking bluebird, Beatrice (v/o Melanie Lynskey), who in exchange offers to guide them to the good witch Adelaide who will surely be able to help them get home. She seems oddly invested in this, despite being openly disdainful of the pair. And so ensues a picaresque adventure as they embark on their journey.

So, again, this is actually a miniseries rather than a film, but I haven’t done that for a while, right? Although unlike The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (2015), this one wasn’t produced as a film and then cut into parts (though I gather when it’s rebroadcast it’s usually in an omnibus form). While there’s very much an ongoing plot, every episode does have its own distinct setting and tells smaller, mostly contained story within the overall narrative. While obviously there are films that do this sort of thing, it’s not really standard practice and almost certainly wouldn’t be something that’d be made on the sort of scale and with the sort of backing of this. Ostensibly (but possibly not really) Cartoon Network’s first miniseries, Over the Garden Wall has a level of production value that was, at least at the time, unusual for the network. You could also argue that it’s their only true one to date, having one set of episodes with definitive beginning, middle and end to its story, rather than them trying to glorify first seasons of potential series or epilogue seasons of ones that’ve officially finished… or those latter seasons of Adventure Time (2010-2018) that have through plots. That’s a thing. I guess Infinity Train (2019-2021) is kind of borderline. Well, whatever.

The show is steeped in the aesthetic of traditional Americana and colonial and pre-war iconography. Despite evoking these however, it doesn’t explicitly incorporate any real folktales into its narrative, nor does it really try and lampoon them in anyway, using motifs in a largely straight manner. This is pretty uncommon for modern fare, with even Disney self-consciously trying to subvert the tropes they helped popularise (though they are really trying to have their cake and eat it on that front). Over the Garden Wall’s point of reference isn’t really skewing Disney, though that is perhaps misleading. In addition to its folksy illustration look, the aesthetic also pays homage to early twentieth century animation, perhaps most obviously the more dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) style of the Fleischer Studio, but there’s also suggestions of Windsor McCay and, of course, early Disney (though in interview, Patrick McHale also references much later Soviet animations, such as those of Yuri Norstein, as an inspiration). Bear in mind that much of that style which is associated with the studio’s fairy tale adaptations wasn’t really solidified until Cinderella (1950); earlier efforts such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), even up to (perhaps most relevant to Over the Garden Wall) the short The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949), tend to have a somewhat different feel to a lot of the studio’s later output. And, yes, I’m aware that Snow White is the only one of those early films that’s actually a traditional folktale rather than a nineteenth century story that’s somehow found itself viewed as a fairy story.

God, I hate looking up stuff on folktales. Things always seem to act like you should have the ATU index memorised by heart.

Anyway, the upshot here is that it uses the familiar motifs not in a parodic fashion but for the resonance that arises due to their familiarity. It imparts a fairly obvious moral that nonetheless isn’t really a straight copy of stereotypical märchen mores nor a subversion of the kind that are increasingly typical; appearance versus reality, that which is familiar is not necessarily good, that which is unknown is not necessarily bad. The world of Over the Garden Wall is not so simple as say the unknown is good, however the characters are put in more danger by a reluctance to venture into it and sticking to what they know, or what they think they know, at any rate. Fairy tale expectations are subverted, but not for the purpose of comedy; essentially everyone and everything has a hidden side to which others are blind, either inadvertently or wilfully, but eventually will have to be acknowledged. The brimstone behind the treacle, if you will, and perhaps vice versa. It’s a metaphor for adolescence, y’see? Specifically within the narrative it’s Wirt’s, as he’s arguably the most central character with the biggest arc. The pastoral past aesthetic of the woods and the fields are to evoke this nostalgic feel of children’s stories and with them youth, but at the same time the worlds of these stories aren’t real and, in many ways, never really were. These are a mythological imagined past that never really existed but enjoy people pretending they did. We’ve been seeing a lot of that in real life of late. The late autumnal theming of the story serves not only to accentuate the false cosiness of this fantasy, but also ties into the adolescence theme; darkness is encroaching on the world of childhood so far as Wirt’s concerned. Leaves are falling, animals are going into hibernation, days grow short and the weather is changing. As life disappears from the forest, this fantasy world becomes gradually less recognisable and more inhospitable.

On that front, I suppose it would be remiss of me not to talk about the sense of morbidity that pervades. In some ways, I’m kind of loath to, mind. It’s a fairly common point of discussion in the increasingly common articles about the miniseries for one (I swear to god that when I made the decision to write about this I wasn’t aware that there’d been a resurgence in discourse regarding the show over the past year-ish) so I felt I should take a different tack with it, but also it’s difficult to discuss too much without getting into spoiler territory, which I prefer to try and avoid. Then again, I suppose by even bringing up that it does so itself kind of hints at spoiling stuff. On yet another hand, I’d like to imagine any adult viewer would be able to figure out what the show’s hinting at before the big reveal, even if they don’t figure out the exact specifics, much like how way back when my mother figured out the reveal in The Rimini Riddle (1992-1995) quite a while before they actually stated it on the show. I mean, the death motifs scattered liberally throughout Over the Garden Wall aren’t really hidden. Mind you, given the state of the internet, who knows? Still, there’s certainly enough groundwork for you to figure out that the pair are literally dying over the course of the series as the season changes and the scenarios they find themselves in become more and more bleak; if the second episode with the town in the potter’s field whose residents think the children seem a bit early isn’t enough to make you realise that something bad has happened to them, then perhaps textual analysis isn’t for you. It doesn’t go the full Night on the Galactic Railroad, the 1985 film of which is the gold standard in Children’s Animated Adventures in Mortality™, with the concept, though the two do share quite a bit without going into detail about it. Seems like they could’ve shared more, given McHale’s comments about earlier ideas for both the overall premise as well as for the ending. To be fair, in the metaphor sense, Galactic Railroad also uses death as a coming-of-age device, though in that case it’s a bit more concerned with spiritual growth rather than the more emotional kind seen in Garden Wall.

It's kind of a bizarre project for Cartoon Network, or really much of American television in general. The miniseries format has pretty much died, with most ‘limited’ series, as they tend to get called now, in the past decade or two tending to be things that are very much set up to continue if they happen to be popular enough. To see something where the creator’s fairly steadfast in it being complete(-ish)† within the confines of its sub-two hour run time is increasingly unusual for TV, and seems even more so for being produced by and for a children’s channel, which tend to thrive on their output having dozens upon dozens of episodes to show again and again on a loop, along with vast arrays of tie in merchandise and licensing deals. And yet it happened, with something that has an unusually dark and melancholy air for something aimed at children. It does appear to have worked to some degree though. It’s struck a chord with the audience, or an audience, at any rate, enjoying quite a bit of fondness that’s been steadily growing over time. Also, Emmys. It got some of those.

Oh, yeah, also it’s meant to be like Hallowe’en. This is only really hinted at for much of the series, but, yes, that’s why this post is timed as it is.

…It originally aired the week AFTER Hallowe’en though. So that’s a thing.

† McHale did write a handful of comics that use some plots that didn’t make it into the final product which are apparently deemed as part of the story canon. They’re explicitly set between some of the earlier episodes however rather than any sort of continuation. Being owned by a major media conglomerate however, there is as ever further stuff licensed out beyond those. THERE’S PROFIT TO BE HAD!