Over the Garden Wall (miniseries)

Plot

The series follows two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg (voiced by Elijah Wood and Collin Dean respectively), who become lost in a strange forest called the Unknown. In order to find their way home, the two must travel across the apparently magic forest with the occasional help of the wandering, mysterious and elderly Woodsman (Christopher Lloyd) and Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey), an irritable bluebird who travels with the boys in order to find a woman called Adelaide, who can supposedly undo the curse on Beatrice and her family and show the half-brothers the way home.

Wirt, the older brother, is a worry-prone teenager and would rather keep to himself than have to make a decision. His three passions are the clarinet, poetry, and architecture but he keeps this private out of fear of being mocked. On the other hand, Greg, the younger brother, is all about play and being carefree, much to Wirt's chagrin and the danger to himself and others. Greg carries a frog (Jack Jones), whose name is undetermined and who can communicate only through singing. Stalking the main cast is the Beast (Samuel Ramey), an ancient creature who leads lost souls astray until they lose their hope and willpower and turn into "Edelwood trees".

Final chapters

In the final two episodes, it is revealed that Wirt and Greg are actually two boys from the modern era. Wirt and Greg's strange appearance stems from the fact it was Halloween the night they were transported into the Unknown. Wirt, attempting to take back an embarrassing poetry tape he made for a girl he likes, had followed her to a graveyard scary story gathering before a police officer scared him and Greg into jumping over the cemetery's garden wall. On the other side of the wall, they landed on train tracks where Greg was almost hit by a train. Wirt pushed them both off a hill into a lake/river in an attempt to save him, knocking them both unconscious in the process.

At the end of the last episode, Wirt and Greg wake up in a hospital, with Greg telling a story but being cut off before we can hear what it's about. As the scene ends, Greg's frog begins to glow, due to having eaten a magic bell in The Unknown, suggesting that there was at least some physical aspect to the story. The series ends with a slow montage of how Wirt and Greg affected the inhabitants of the Unknown.

Production

Production for Over the Garden Wall commenced in March 2014. The ten episodes ordered for the series marked the first miniseries on the Cartoon Network. Created by Patrick McHale, a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, the show was based on the animated short film Tome of the Unknown, which he wrote and directed for Cartoon Network Studios as part of their shorts development program.

The show was first envisioned in 2004 with a scarier and more adventure-based storyline. Before working as a storyboard artist on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, McHale pitched Garden Wall in 2006. He saw it as "a possible Halloween special", but had trouble adapting the premise with a larger story arc. After his work for Flapjack, McHale moved on to co-develop Adventure Time, where he served as creative director, and subsequently as a writer. The network later asked him if he had interest in developing a pilot, which led to him returning to Garden Wall, polishing it and pitching it again to the network. They ultimately settled upon the miniseries format, as McHale felt that it would lead to "something that felt higher quality than what we could do with a regular series".

The show features Wood (reprising his role from the short), Lynskey, and Dean as the main voice cast. It has been characterized as a "comedy-fantasy" series. In an interview dated October 2014, McHale stated that while it mostly adheres to the genre, there would be some frightening moments which try to be "an experience for the audience". Despite this, he and his crew tried to maintain a balance with "other episodes that are just light and funny". In same interview McHale depicts his inspirations for the show, including children's literature of the 19th century, early 20th-century American music and folk art in general. Additionally, McHale sought inspiration from Gustave Doré and "Alice Comedies" for the show's "layouts". Likewise for its music, McHale shared that it would contain various styles, including "classic American, opera singing", but that it would not contain much of any Broadway qualities.

Meanwhile, Nick Cross served as art director and Nate Cash as supervising director; both worked with McHale alongside storyboard artists located in New York and Chicago. This distance proved difficult for McHale, who found it "particularly daunting considering the idiosyncratic nature of the production".

Broadcast

McHale's original short, Tome of the Unknown, was screened at the 2014 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where McHale earned the Bruce Corwin Award for best animated short film. It also received an honorable mention at the 2013 Ottawa International Animation Festival.

At the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con International, a preview of the show was screened along with various panels for other shows on the network. Episode 2 was previewed at the 2014 New York Comic Con, which McHale and the main cast attended. The show made its premiere on November 3, 2014 on Cartoon Network, and ran over five consecutive nights. The entirety of it was published on iTunes preceding its broadcast.

The series aired on Cartoon Network in Australia from December 15 to 19, 2014 and on Cartoon Network in the United Kingdom and Ireland from April 6 to 10, 2015.

Music

Various melodies and songs based on pre-1950s music are heard throughout the series. Elijah Wood, the voice actor for Wirt, has said that "if this show were a record, it would be played on a phonograph". Songs from the series include "Into the Unknown", its title song, composed by Patrick McHale and sung by Jack Jones; "A Courting Song", composed by the Petrojvic Blasting Company and performed by Frank Fairfield; and "Come Wayward Souls", sung by Samuel Ramey as the Beast.

The majority of the series' songs have been officially uploaded to YouTube. On the DVD release they can be heard, along with visuals and without dialogue, in a special feature known as the Composer's Cut. An extended version of the soundtrack, featuring 32 tracks and totaling around 44 minutes in length, was released in the form of a 180 gram vinyl record by Mondo in August 2016. The extended soundtrack debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con, with a limited 1,000 copies, featuring a cover designed by Sam Wolfe Connelly. The extended vinyl is also available as a webstore exclusive from Mondo.

Home media

The animated miniseries was released on DVD in the United States on September 8, 2015 from Cartoon Network and Warner Home Video. The DVD release took place two months earlier on July 8 in Australia. The DVD features all ten episodes of the show, commentaries, the original pilot, alternate title cards, and deleted animatics. Other extras on the DVD include the Composer's Cut, an option wherein a viewer can watch the show with only the visuals and the background music; and the mini-documentary Behind Over the Garden Wall.

Critical reception

Over the Garden Wall was critically acclaimed. Preceding its premiere, Patrick Kevin Day of the Los Angeles Times called it "funny, creepy" and, from the premise, "not as simple as it sounds". In TV Guide and also before the premiere, Megan Walsh-Boyle felt that the show's fictional universe "sounds like a world worth getting lost in". Meredith Woerner of io9 called a preview of the show "amazing", "weird, and cute and great", reflecting "all the things we love about this oddball animation renaissance we are currently living in". Conversely, Amid Amidi of Cartoon Brew judged from the same preview that the animation was lacking. While not discounting its storytelling, music, and production design, he felt that production skimped on animation; he was still looking forward to the series.

Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was "a little too folksy and fairy story" at times, but that its "contemporary strangeness wins out", and concluded that "it is throughout something to behold". Lloyd later wrote that it evoked "a kind of artisanal quality", both in its design and setting, and though the writing felt "a little too intent on its own folksiness", it became more enjoyable throughout. In the New York Times, Mike Hale also felt the writing was sometimes weak and the stories "perilously thin", but concluded that McHale developed an environment worth visiting.

Brian Moylan of The Guardian wrote that the visuals were "absolutely stunning", and that the stories contained "a certain darkness to it that is both mellow and twee at the same time, with a fair amount of anxiety creeping around the edges". Brian Lowry of Variety wrote that Garden Wall was "an admirable experiment", but not one to sustain "the five-night commitment", calling it "slightly mismatched" while praising a departure from "the more abrasive characteristic" of the network's primetime content. Kevin McDonough of the Illinois Daily Journal criticized some of the writing, but summed it up as "an ambitious cartoon" for both younger and older audiences. Jason Bree of the website Agents of Geek called the miniseries "the greatest thing Cartoon Network has ever produced". Kevin Johnson, writing for The A.V. Club, praised the series, giving it an A, saying that "with such a perfect blend of mood, atmosphere, story, and characterization, Over the Garden Wall's 10-episode run will leave you wanting more, but like every great fairy tale, it's a story that knows when it's over."

Comic book adaptation

A one-shot comic book adaptation of the show was announced in October 2014. Produced by KaBoom!, an imprint of Boom! Studios, the comic was released on November 5, 2014. The comic was supervised by McHale and was produced as an oversized special. The comic was illustrated by Jim Campbell, a writer/storyboard artist on the television series. A special variant cover, by McHale, was also released. The success of the standalone comic led to further issues being commissioned in May 2015 and began to be released in August 2015. According to Patrick McHale, the comic books would be similar to the one-shot comic, detailing the events that occurred in between certain episodes and will expand on the miniseries. The success of the series of one-shots led to an ongoing series of comics, serving as both a sequel and prequel to the series, rather than telling adventures that happened between episodes. The stories are told parallel, with half the comic detailing Greg returning to mysterious dreamlands in his sleep. The other half chronicles the Woodsman's daughter, Anna, and how she became lost in the Unknown.