This great guest squee is from Fairywine!

Fairywine is a longtime SBTB devotee and lover of fantasy, romance, historical fiction, poetry and/or any permutations of those genres. Always ready for a cup of tea (black, with sugar and cream). Engage in discussions of European history at your own risk, because she will talk your ear off and possibly cry a bit about Elisabeth of Austria in the bargain.

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“Somewhere lost in the clouded annals of history lies a place that few have seen—a mysterious place called the Unknown, where long forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood.”

-The Narrator, Over The Garden Wall

All the seasons have their charms, but there’s something special to autumn, isn’t there? Spring, summer, winter–to see them is to know what they are about, and that straightforwardness certainly isn’t a bad thing. But the fall is its own creature, balancing a strange duality of coziness and tension. What other season could contain within it the homey, gentle cheer of soft knits and pumpkin spice everything, set against a holiday that rejoices in the scary and the impending awareness that winter is coming and you’d better be ready for it or suffer the consequences? Even when you’re in a locale where the temperature hit 90 degrees last weekend (save me), the instinct to bundle up still remains surprisingly hard to shake.

Most of all, autumn has a mystery to it. Anything could happen, no matter how strange, and there would be a place for it this time of year…and no series captures the spirit of the season more perfectly than Over The Garden Wall. It’s the essence of fall distilled into animated form, and a truly fantastic show that’s a great watch any day. But Over The Garden Wall shines most brilliantly when enjoyed in the autumn-a creative work worthy of the strangest and most otherworldly of seasons.

The premise is so simple a single sentence can sum it up. Two brothers, Wirt (the elder, panged by Adolescence) and Greg (the younger, a bottomless well of cheer), are lost in strange woods within a place called “The Unknown” and trying to return home. From this creator Patrick McHale unfolds a tale in which everything is vastly more complicated and enigmatic than it first appears to be, including Wirt and Greg themselves.

For me personally, Over The Garden Wall functions like Patrick McHale took a good, long rummage through my brain, scooped out everything I adore, and set it all in a fantastically animated medium like jewels in a gorgeous necklace. I’d find it unnerving if I wasn’t so happy to get a series that feels like it was tailored to my exact tastes. History! Folklore! Mystery! Fantasy! It’s the kind of spoiling that drives a lady to really abuse her exclamation point key with enthusiasm.

Over The Garden Wall takes every element it handles and just executes it so, so well. It’s an achievement that’s all the more impressive considering it isn’t just doing this within a run of only ten episodes, but those episodes are only eleven minutes long apiece. Yet that’s enough for McHale to tell the story without feeling like he’s rushed or cut anything out. I was left wanting more of this strange, unfathomable world even as I acknowledged the perfect completeness of the experience, one that only an animated medium could have realized so perfectly. It’s an astonishing balancing act, pulled off with a finesse and care that makes it seem effortless.

The three fundamentals of fiction writing-plot, dialogue, and characters-are of course top-notch here. Over The Garden Wall is officially categorized as a “mystery-comedy”, a duality fitting for an autumnal show that could feel disjointed but works perfectly. The particular genius with which McHale unfolds the mysteries of the series is that he hides absolutely nothing. The clues of the Unknown are right there from the very beginning, but it’s up to the viewer to piece together context, symbolism, and other hints to figure out what’s going on as the plot progresses. As I got more of an inkling for what was happening, I found myself staring eagle-eyed at every frame, looking for the next bit of the puzzle.

Even then it’s easy to miss a ton. Over The Garden Wall has a very high rewatch value in this regard. My first rewatch after I finished the series was a really unique experience, giving every scene a whole new layer of meaning and tension. I remember actually gasping at one of the moments within the first few seconds of episode one, because now I knew what was happening and I was so stunned Patrick McHale just went there right from the start.

And yet Over The Garden Wall is still a comedy, and one that has humor of every stripe, from lighthearted puns, to snark, to black comedy that I’m amazed snuck by the censors on Cartoon Network. I know I found the need to occasionally pause my watching because I was laughing too hard at a great line or visual gag and didn’t want to miss a single second of the episode. Over The Garden Wall knows the importance of having humor and seriousness in equal measure, and it never detracts from the considerable depth the show has nor feels like the tone is mismatched.

But of course even the best plot and dialogue can’t succeed if they don’t feature characters we aren’t invested in. Over The Garden Wall is as excellent in this regard as it is with literally every other thing it does. Wirt, Greg, and their guide Beatrice (the most caustic little bluebird ever) are some of the most complex and layered characters I’ve seen in ages.

Wirt is like looking into a mirror for me at that age. Introverted, intellectual, awkward around people, and way too into poetry, Wirt’s not a bad kid but he has his share of maturing to do, as well as growing out of his natural tendency towards mopiness and becoming a better older brother. Greg is all that’s sunshine and goodness, but he can be naive and thoughtless to a degree that’s dangerous in the Unknown (but again, he is only five or so). The ways in which Wirt, Greg, their relationship, and their experiences in the Unknown evolve gives Over The Garden Wall the emotional depth it posses.

And you’d have to go a long time to find someone as simultaneously adorable and acidic as Beatrice, but she has her reasons for being like that, and seeing how she grows after meeting the brothers is truly fascinating. We dig deep into these three over the course of the show, and the amount of development they each get is generous and organic despite the short run time of the episodes. These are realized people (species notwithstanding), and I felt so much for them in their good moments and their bad ones. I cared about them, and thought about their fates long after finishing Over The Garden Wall.

The trio of Wirt, Greg, and Beatrice is undoubtedly the heart of Over The Garden Wall, but every character is memorable and rounded regardless of importance. I guarantee you’ll remember The Beast long after you’ve finished this show (your nightmares certainly will), or find yourself thinking about the Woodsman. But there were also characters that have maybe two or three lines of dialogue who still made an impact, that I believed had their own stories outside of the one told in Over The Garden Wall. That isn’t just good character writing, it’s good world building-yet another thing this series has in abundance.

Speaking of, the world of the Unknown is an excellent one, mysterious and endlessly fascinating. I don’t want to go into much detail because just experiencing it all for the first time is one of the great joys of your first watch of Over The Garden Wall. But I can say history lovers, especially those familiar with Americana ranging from the 1600s to roughly the 1900s, are going to be especially delighted here. It’s a smart show, one that references everything from late medieval literature, to the phases of the moon, to board games from the Gilded Age. (Most importantly, it’s a show that also trusts in the intelligence of its viewers and their ability to put two and two together.)

Again, there are many more stories the viewer can sense lurking beneath the surface of the current one, and more besides that we don’t see but know must be out there. Good world building feels like it exists vastly outside the borders of the narrative, and the Unknown definitely falls into that category. Keeping the show on such a short run ensured the quality never dropped, but there was definitely material for far more than ten episodes here. (And happily for those wanting more, the comics expand on the world beyond the main animated series).

Yet to Over The Garden Wall’s credit, it’s not afraid to embrace ambiguity either. Remember how viewers absolutely lost their minds over whether the top ever fell over in Inception? That response I think scared a lot of creators into making sure any mysterious elements in their fiction would always have an explanation, and that’s really to our detriment. Over The Garden Wall doesn’t leave viewers hanging as far as its main mysteries go, but it also takes the tack there are some questions too vast for definite answers. It’s a brave choice, and one that really adds to the atmosphere of the show as well as the experience of watching it.

It would be criminal not to give the music of Over The Garden Wall its richly earned due. Here is yet another example of how Patrick McHale took the fact he was telling his story through a visual and auditory medium and used this to not just make something enjoyable but actually enhance the final product. The soundtrack he and the Petrojvic Blasting Company collaborated on is not just atmospheric and memorable. It also manages to do justice to several wildly distinctive musical eras.

But their compositions are much more than just really good music, but another vital well of clues that delve into the mysteries of the Unknown. Especially the songs with lyrics, which are so captivating it’s very easy to miss McHale literally spelling out exactly what’s going on. (More than once I went back during my rewatch, set up closed captions during the song numbers, and went “They straight up said it! How did I miss that? How?!?”)

From all the pictures thus far, you might be thinking that the animation for Over The Garden Wall is at least good, and you’d be right. I’d say it’s nothing less than stunning. Patrick McHale worked on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Adventure Time, so it goes without saying that he knows his stuff. But Over The Garden Wall has a sophistication and timelessness to its character designs, animation and backgrounds that I think will age it much more gracefully than a lot of its contemporaries.

A lot of this is due to how strongly influenced the series is by 1930s animation, especially Fleischer Studios and early Disney cartoons like their Silly Symphonies series. McHale emulated elements which have stood the test of time, and left out what wouldn’t work. The overall color palette for the series is gorgeous too, with muted yet rich tones of reds, oranges, browns, blues and greys that seemed to have been pulled straight from Victorian Halloween cards.

And finally, the voice cast is freaking awesome and honestly makes the show worth watching for who they managed to get here alone. Wirt is voiced by Elijah Wood! And if that isn’t enough, there’s Christopher Lloyd, John Cleese, and Tim Freaking Curry, along with tons of other fabulous talented folks. Tim Freaking Curry! Do I really need to hook you after that?

Over The Garden Wall is a show everyone should see, but especially now that we’re in the heart of the fall season. It’s beautiful, smart, engaging, deep, fun, scary and mysterious in turns. I’d say anyone past the age of eight will get a lot of enjoyment out of it (there’s no gore or serious violence, but the scarier aspects I think would be too intense for a younger child). Curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and a blanket, dim the lights, and take your own journey into the Unknown. When you come out, not quite the same as you were before…what could be more befitting of autumn than that?

“How the gentle wind beckons through the leaves
As autumn colors fall
Dancing in a swirl
Of golden memories
The loveliest lies of all…”

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You can find Over the Garden Wall streaming on Hulu or for purchase on Amazon.