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Frank Baum’s Oz books, Mark Twain’s “local color” writing, and the literary legends of Washington Irving. Riverboats, log cabins, single room schoolhouses, husking bees, and a folksy, turn-of-the-century musical score underline an Americana ambiance that evokes Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, L. Scenic shots of golden maple leaves, pumpkin patches and wild turkey ensure that the “dark wood” of a mythical afterlife is readily identifiable as New England in the fall.
CARTOONS LIKE OVER THE GARDEN WALL SERIES
The series locates its fairy tale world, not in the classic castles and cottages of European tradition, but in an American rural past. Instead of making the strange familiar, the show makes the familiar strange, offering a fairyland that is all the more uncanny for being close to home. In privileging imagery and mood over lessons, Over the Garden Wall captures something that has become vanishingly rare in children’s media: the moral ambiguity of fairy tale worlds. The miniseries responds to the ironic self-awareness of recent postmodern fairy tale adaptations by stripping away a century of popular culture associations and using motifs, not as a kind of narrative shorthand, but as an artist’s palette of evocative, available images. Though the show’s vintage aesthetic drew the most attention, Over the Garden Wall’s nostalgia is not purely decorative, but ideological.
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Favoring traditional hand-drawn animation, a literary and artistic pedigree that skews heavily pre-20th century, and an emphasis on narrative closure that is becoming uncommon in an increasingly serialized and sequel-driven marketplace, the miniseries is tonally and stylistically distinct from the rapid-fire reference-based humor of Shrek and company. Rather than trading on the familiarity of iconic characters, images, or plot points to tell an old story with a fresh twist, McHale instead tells an original fairy tale in a pointedly old-fashioned way.
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Unlike the majority of fairy tale films and television shows of the last decade, Patrick McHale’s Emmy Award-winning animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall (2014) does not disrupt or critique fairy tale norms. Playing against these well-worn scripts, a wave of postmodern parodies-the Shrek franchise (2001–), Ella Enchanted (2004), Happily N’Ever After (2005), Hoodwinked! (2006) and so forth-struck a chord with audiences, but also helped to further the moral simplification of fairy tales, naturalizing clichés even as they subverted them. They begin to function less like building blocks of endlessly variable narratives, and more like puzzle pieces that must be put together in the right order to reach a given message or moral: Appearances can be deceiving, so be patient with your beastly lover. But as the canon of familiar fairy tales has narrowed, cementing much-mediated versions of the stories as singular and authoritative, fairy tales become less fluid, and motifs become less mobile. Fairy tales are transforming and transformative texts like their characters, they break rules, shape-shift, and change the world.