Over the Garden Wall

From the imagination on inspiration of Patrick Mchale comes the absolutely wonderful, charming, and quirky cartoon mini-series, Over the Garden Wall. When I first saw that this series was 10 episodes, I was not sure I wanted to invest the time---but each episode is only 11 minutes longs, making the entire series the same length as most aminated movies. There is so much to love in this mini-series--the snarky dialogue, the fantastic, old timey musical numbers, and the twisting fairy tale based plot. The thing that I loved the best was noticing all of the influences, visual tributes, Easter Eggs, and nob and winks to animation, illustrations, and music from the past. One of the strongest influences seemed to be Studio Ghibli. The series struck me as an Americanized tribute to Studio Ghibli set in an English fairy tale. There were other allusions to Alice in Wonderland, Wind and the Willows, The world of OZ (both the books and movies), 1920s and 30s cartoons from animators such as Disney and Ōishi Ikuo, and even Frog and Toad. The music was equally wonderful with obvious influences from Vaudeville, 30s to 50 musicals, and even some Leon Redbone. This is great stuff. Watch it!! Thanks to Letterboxd users 🤓 and CoopaT and brady and dopeydia for getting this on my watchlist.