Enchanting animation, odd & creepy, strange & whimsical, Patrick McHale’s hand-drawn mini-series (10 ten-minute chapters first seen on Cartoon Network) soon bewitched all who saw it. Filled with subconscious childhood fears of loss & abandonment, it opens without explanation as two young brothers find they are lost in a Grimm forest and can’t find a way home. Structurally, if not geographically, it’s familiar territory, each chapter set in a new location with fantastical creatures who might be friend or foe. Surely one of them will know the way out! But any directions they get are Delphic, designed to be inscrutable, confusing or contradictory. So too our Freudian siblings: Kid Ego & Kid Id; while the communities they come across survive within Jungian collective memory & ritual. Some of it, especially in the early going, frightening stuff . . . and not just for kids. Loads of cultural & visual references, from WIZARD OF OZ to HANSEL & GRETEL; from the ‘30s 2-strip TechniColor of Isling & Harmon cartoons to an Auntie from Studio Ghibli. Vocal stylings ranging from Jack Jones smooth Pop standards to Sam Ramey smooth operatic baritone. Even a bit of faux Randy Newman. Yet none of it feeling shoe-horned in for show, but part of the free-floating gestalt. Something that gets too direct an explanation in Chapter 9 after we’ve given in to any lack of logic. Better not to know or speculate, merely accept, like kids hearing a scary fairy tale for the first time.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: McHale’s sole credit after this is writer on the animated ADVENTURE TIME series. Hopefully more of his distinctive voice will come thru on the upcoming Guillermo del Toro stop-motion PINOCCHIO adaptation where he's listed as co-writer.
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