Warner Bros.
Cartoon Network’s first miniseries, 2014’s Over the Garden Wall, follows half-brothers Wirt (Elijah Wood) and Greg (Collin Dean) as they navigate a mysterious forest in their quest to find their way home, encountering many strange beings and scenarios along the way.
Series creator Patrick McHale had previously worked on the likes of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Adventure Time, and while those two shows were what enabled him to pitch Over the Garden Wall to Cartoon Network, the concept for McHale’s miniseries was hatched before either of those cult classics premiered.
With McHale’s previous work clearly evident, Over the Garden Wall showcases many stylistic and narrative parallels to The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Adventure Time, which is not to say that the miniseries is derivative, as it is.
Instead Over the Garden Wall is a more honed and eclectic entry into the type of animation popularized by Cartoon Network in the 2010’s, benefiting greatly from being a close-ended tale with a limited runtime.
Layered in a different way to shows with multiple seasons, Over the Garden Wall pulls you into its wonderfully eerie world and continues to envelop the viewer in its mesmerizing weirdness, purposefully meandering its way to a conclusion that adds renewed context to Wirt and Greg’s journey, making you want to watch it all over again once the 10th episode has concluded.
The voice cast as a whole also impresses with a myriad of seasoned talent lending their voices to the series, with Wood imbuing Wirt with angst and annoyance and Dean’s child voice underlining Greg’s naïve and happy-go-lucky nature, as the pair juxtapose one another’s qualities in a way that makes one emphasize the other, and allows the pair to play off of one another as they try to find their way home through this unpredictable and imaginative world.
The visual style of the animation is both representative of the style popular at the time as well as drawing on more vintage styles, which not only gives it a distinct identity of its own, it also further emphasizes the sincere fairytale-like quality of the series that saturates it from start to finish.
Having the rare benefit of working well as both a 10-part miniseries as well as a 110-minute feature, Over the Garden Wall makes for a particularly wistful and whimsical title to revisit from time to time, especially once the warm color palette and longer nights of fall closes in around you, and Halloween alluringly gleams before the shift to winter.
Extras include audio commentaries, alternative audio tracks, featurette, the original pilot,, alternate title cards and deleted animatics.
Verdict: 10 out of 10.
