The Transcendently Dark Cartoon Network Miniseries Over the Garden Wall is Magical, Miraculous

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

One of the things that I miss most about my time writing for The A.V. Club was all the free crap people used to send us. Oh, but I loved all of that junk! It was at once an eyesore and a thing of beauty. 

Every goddamn day was like Christmas! I wish that I had held onto EVERYTHING and not just the stuff worth keeping because I would like to remember my past more vividly and souvenirs and swag have the additional benefit of reminding you where you’ve been and what you’ve experienced. 

Here’s the really fun part: there was absolutely no cause and effect relationship between me getting a super-neat piece of swag and actually writing about what it was promoting. 

I’m sure The A.V Club got some sweet-ass swag promoting the 2014 animated mini-series Over the Garden Wall but by that time I had left the site for The Dissolve. 

Cartoon Network always used to send us sweet, sweet swag. Have I mentioned how much I loved all the free stuff? I’m getting teary-eyed and nostalgic just thinking about all that merchandise lost forever. 

Alas, I have not gotten even a single piece of merchandise promoting Over the Garden Wall but I am going to praise it extensively all the same. I can do so with a pure heart and non-compromised ethics but I really would have liked some Over the Garden Wall merchandise to remind me just how much I dig it.

Greg!

Over the Garden Wall opens with neurotic teenager Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) and his half-brother Greg (voiced by Colin Dean) lost in the woods on their way home. Greg represents a superior example of a type that I like to call The Ralph because Ralph Wiggum represents this archetype in its purest form. 

The Ralph is a Holy Fool who is guileless and unceasingly sincere. The Ralph happily exists in a world of his own. The Ralph is inherently optimistic and sunny, convinced that the world is a wonderful and magical place. 

If done badly, The Ralph can be annoying and derivative. If done well, it can be a goddamn delight, a pure spirit you can’t help but be charmed by. That’s Greg here. Over the Garden Wall goes to some very dark, very gothic, very primal places but Greg’s internal light keeps it from ever getting too dark or too grim. 

In the deep, dark, mysterious woods the half-brothers encounter tormented figures like a Woodsman voiced by Christopher Lloyd  with a tragic secret and Beatrice, a bluebird voiced by Melanie Lynskey who was human until a curse resulted in her entire family turning into bluebirds.

Over the Garden Wall does not inject adult darkness into the world of fairy tales so much as it mines the gothic horror endemic to the genre.  In the process creator Patrick McHale has created something unmistakably adult that also feels rooted in the heightened emotions and dread of childhood, when the world seems impossibly vast and terrifying. 

As the pilgrims continue their search for a way home they encounter a series of fantastical creatures and tableaus that play out in unexpected ways. For example they come across a seemingly abandoned town only to stumble across what appear to be a spooky race of pumpkin-headed people. 

Then they realize that the pumpkins are merely festive masks because the revelers are actually talking, anthropomorphic skeletons who dress up as pumpkin people for special occasions. 

When the skeleton people realize that Greg and Wirt are outsiders they force them to work for them but instead of years on a chain gang they’re free to leave after working for just a few hours. 

Over the Garden Wall is very funny but its absurdist, surreal humor is a universe away from the glib pop culture shenanigans of Shrek. It’s closer to The Princess Bride in the way that it is forever deconstructing the well-worn tropes and conventions of fairytales while also working spectacularly as a fractured fairy tale.

The further Wirt and Greg travel, the more lost and seemingly doomed they become before the final two episodes upend everything that has come before by revealing that Wirt is a present-day high school student who was plunged into another reality after a particularly eventful Halloween evening along with Greg. 

This masterful piece of animation just gets deeper, darker and more resonant as it speeds to a shatteringly powerful, quietly profound conclusion. At the risk of hyperbole, this is far and away the single greatest piece of entertainment in which a hero played by Elijah Wood undergoes an epic quest. It’s so good that it makes all of the movies or television shows that fit that description seem like total garbage by comparison. 

Wood, Lloyd and Lynskey aren’t the only big names in the preposterously stacked voice cast. The mini-series somehow also snagged Tim freaking Curry, Bebe Neuwirth, Fred Stoller as a horse, Thomas Lennon, Chris Isaak and John Cleese before he went full TERF and completely ruined himself for everyone but right wing creeps. 

Over the Garden Wall is a work of beauty and humor, sadness and cracked philosophy. I’m glad that I was forced to watch this terrific miniseries but truth be told I’d enjoy the whole experience a LOT more if the good folks over at Cartoon Network had sent me a tee shirt or a hat with its name on it. 

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