My Semi-Loyal Pet: What Is Life?

What Is Life aired on June 14, 2010 and was storyboarded by Luther McLaurin and Armen Mirzaian, who had previously boarded the Jiggler and Business Time as a team.  This is Mirzaian's last effort for the series.

Despite having a slightly different structure, What Is Life has a very similar tone and pace to the tother two episodes by this storyboarding team.  McLaurin and Mirzaian have at this point developed a good rapport and, even if they're not the most distinctive of Adventure Time storyboarders, manage to put forth a good story here.

This story is primarily focused on being a parody of the kind of "robot achieves sentience" story, often playing it very straitlaced - for example, Finn's patronizing "no, NEPTR, we call that snow."  This is followed up in all the ways you'd expect - NEPTR at first thinks that, due to his failure to be perfect, Finn must enjoy watching him suffer, which is an idea the show will return to in its third and fourth seasons.

NEPTR also has an interesting narrative backstory.  He comes out of Finn's incredibly half-assed attempt to build a robot and a mysterious stroke of lighting.  This is a multi-tiered joke, relying on the audience to understand both the situational comment it's making (the ludicrous nature of doing an episode of Adventure Time about a robot) and on the character level as well - Finn fails to be surprised that his invention has worked and takes the whole thing completely seriously.  It's also a strong use of narrative compression that saves a significant amount of time and legwork.

NEPTR's design is pleasantly haphazard, certainly making him appear mismatched and all over the place.  This is an apt decision, considering this is the crux of his character both physically and spiritually.

Also notable is Jake's lack of significance.  He only appears very briefly twice in the episode, leaving Finn to do all the heavy lifting.  This makes sense, as Jake's laid-back personality wouldn't have much of a role in this intensely operatic conflict between Finn and the Ice King.

The Ice King is also used very interestingly in this story.  A lot of time is spent emphasizing the complete loneliness and pathetic nature of his character, such as his impersonation of a potential girlfriend and his continual address of Gunter, which becomes prominent here for the first time.  However, he's not particularly villainous here, and we're left with a huge amount of sympathy for him at the end of the episode.

The episode's big twist is that the Ice King's lightning infuses NEPTR with the Ice King's desire to kidnap princesses.  However, this idea is basically not explored at all beyond how it makes Finn and the Ice King feel; NEPTR remains a cypher.  Ultimately, this is resolved completely arbitrarily by NEPTR choosing Finn and throwing pie at the Ice King and then at Jake, leaving the Ice King to dream about connecting with his son.

Next Time:  Ocean of Fear

It's Easier To Wear a Hat: The Witch's Garden

The Witch's Garden aired on June 7, 2010, and was boarded by Adam Muto, Kent Osborne, and Niki Yang.  Muto had previously co-boarded Slumber Party Panic, Trouble in Lumpy Space, Prisoners of Love, The Enchirdion, and Wizard with a variety of different people.  Kent Osborne had previously co-boarded My Two Favorite People with Pendleton Ward.  This is Niki Yang's first episode.

Like My Two Favorite People, this is an extremely Jake-centric story.  Once again, the whole thing is structured around one of Jake's character flaws.  In M2FP, this was Jake's jealousy and unwillingness to consider the consequences of his actions; here, Jake's flaws are pride and laziness.  This trait deliberately places Finn and Jake at loggerheads, as Finn's optimistic energy is roundly cancelled out by Jake's refusal to take any kind of action beyond wallowing.

However,  Jake's laziness has its natural limit.  Once Finn is put in danger, Jake is willing to do anything necessary to get him out, even apologizing to the crone who owns the rose garden.

This leads to, once again, the easiest critique of season 1 of Adventure Time:   the casual sexism.  The two female characters that are in this episode are horrifying creatures beyond redemption.  The mermaid has an explicitly sexual reaction to Finn, and the show seems happy to laugh at this.

It's not that the show is ideologically sexist - it's that it hasn't yet developed the tools by which it will become much better at specifically this.

Next time:  What is Life?

Covered in the Dust of a Criminal Act: City of Thieves

City of Thieves aired on May 24, 2010.  It was boarded by Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn, who as a team had boarded Tree Trunks, Ricardio the Heart Guy, Memories of Boom Boom Mountain, and Evicted.  Bert Youn also co-boarded Wizard.

What's interesting about City of Thieves is how similar it is in general outline to Memories of Boom Boom Mountain.  Both stories involve Finn being faced with an impossible problem that pushes him to the very edge of his heroism.  In Memories of Boom Boom Mountain, it's the irreconcilable desires of all sentient beings; in City of Thieves, it's the moral erosion caused by the toxic environment of the city itself, resulting in Finn losing his so-called "purity."

That's not the only difference.  MBBM was, despite pushing Finn pretty far, a relatively upbeat and positive episode in which all the characters were decent people.  City of Thieves has a grimy, unpleasant demeanor which overwhelm's Finn's desire to do good.  This is evident from the color palette of the episode:

The episode is awash with earth tones and appears to have poor lighting.  The houses are jumbled up and chaotically placed.  This air of confusion and griminess becomes increasingly apparent as Finn and Jake also get dirtier and dirtier throughout the episode to go along with their apparent corruption.

The nature of Finn and Jake's corruption is very interesting.  Jake is corrupted much more easily than Finn; ultimately, a pair of bright red boots is all that is needed to tempt Jake into a life of crime, although he appears to be unaware of stealing them.

In this way, Jake is brought down by the city much more than Finn (who we'll discuss later) is.  Jake essentially becomes a typical denizen of the city, stealing whatever takes his fancy.  The primary visual focus in this episode is, like in MBMM, Rube Goldberg-like: the chains of theft, making it clear that nobody is innocent in this city.  It also provides a lot of excellent opportunities for more bizarre and grotesque character design than the typical, more positive Adventure Time setting.

Finn's corruption is much more complex and nuanced.  It comes out of trusting Penny, a pitiable orphan girl who instructs Finn to take a treasure chest that she claims contains her lost flower basket.  However, it transpires that she tricked Finn into stealing the treasure chest so she could have the gold, thus turning Finn into a thief.

This is an interesting ethical principle for Finn to live by.  He judges himself not by his intentions, which were undeniably good, but by the actions he takes.  This is emphasized by his inability to pass through a thief-proof force field, which causes Finn to rethink his own identity as a thief.

Finally, Finn and Jake unite in their corruption.  Having been crushed by the nature of the city, they take a surprisingly nihilistic stance in their resolve to take vengeance on Penny, resulting in a spree of thefts and a late-night confrontation.

Here is where things veer back into normal Adventure Time territory.  Being the type of show we've established that Adventure Time is in season 1, the show needs to reset the status quo, which it does by having Finn and Jake scrub down Penny with soap in an attempt to wash the city's grime and villainy off of her.  In so doing, they end up washing themselves and declare themselves newly pure.

However, the episode has one last interesting twist in that Penny is not actually redeemed by the soap, as she steals Finn's clothes.  The redemption only exists in Finn and Jake's heads, just as their corruption was purely psychological as well.

Next time:  the Witch's Garden.

Quick update

No post this saturday because I'm going camping, but normal post schedule will resume afterwards.

That Actually Hurt: Evicted

Evicted aired on May 17, 2010.  It was boarded by Bert Youn and Sean Jimenez, who had previously boarded Tree Trunks, Ricardio the Heart Guy, and Memories of Boom Boom Mountain together.  Youn had also previously co-boarded Wizard.

Evicted, like Prisoners of Love before it, is largely a setup to introduce a major new recurring character who serves as an antagonist.  Unlike Prisoners of Love, however, Evicted doesn't do this by giving the new character a lot of screentime, it does it by making what screentime the character has extremely memorable.

It's quite interesting to compare Marceline and Ice King at this juncture.  Both are basically antagonists we're supposed to feel some degree of sympathy for, but for vastly different reasons.  Ice King routinely does horrible things and feels no remorse, but he's easy to like because he's so clueless and pathetic.  Marceline, however, does horrible things (specifically stealing Finn and Jake's treehouse), but her motivation is unclear - the whole thing may even be an elaborate practical joke.  The audience also doesn't like her out of sympathy.  The audience likes her because she's cool.

This is established very quickly.  She's clearly much more powerful than Finn an Jake, and she's lived a very exciting life full of adventures.  She's also visually framed in really powerful ways.

Here, she's in the exact center of the frame towering over F&J and exuding calm confidence.

However, Marceline isn't the only interesting aspect of this episode.  This episode is the first Adventure Time episode to figure a song as prominent as this one does.  As Adventure Time would later become very well known for its music, it's tempting to look at this episode as the beginning point of all that, but for reasons that will be discussed down the line, this episode is more of an outlier before the trend starts.

The House Hunting Song is very interesting.  On the one hand, it's the classic trick of narrative compression that the show has been using from its first episode; it enables Finn and Jake to go on a long, epic journey and explore six separate potential houses in the space of a minute an a half.  This narrative convenience also allows Adventure Time to use the advantages of music, such as successful tell-don't-show storytelling.  We get a very clear look at Marceline's psyche through the line "I'm not mean, I'm a thousand years old/and I just lost track of my moral code."  This brief duet also allows the show to absorb the use of nested panels from comics, advancing the narrative in two separate ways simultaneously.

All in all, this is a very important episode, both on its own artistic merits and for the season as a whole.  Next time:  City of Thieves.

Your Newfangled Thinking Will Get Us All Killed: Wizard

Wizard aired on May 10, 2013, becoming the first episode of Adventure Time to air without a new accompanying episode.  It was storyboarded by Pete Browngardt, Adam Muto, and Bert Youn.  This is Pete Browngardt's first and only board for the series; Adam Muto had previously co-boarded Slumber Party Panic and Trouble in Lumpy Space with Elizabeth Ito, as well as Prisoners of Love with Pen Ward and the Enchiridion with Patrick McHale and Pen Ward.  Bert Youn had previously boarded Tree Trunks, Ricardio the Heart Guy, and Memories of Boom Boom Mountain, all with Sean Jimenez.

It's time to talk about Adventure Time's status quo.  Eleven episodes into the show, we as viewers can now tell whether episodes are breaking the mold or following the typical style.

The structure of a "typical" episode would be Finn and Jake go on an adventure, make some kind of strategic error, correct their mistake, and then move on, possibly having learned something and possibly not.  Retroactively designating episodes as "typical episodes," I would include Tree Trunks, the Jiggler, Business Time, and Memories of Boom Boom Mountain.  This, too, is a typical episode.

It's important, however, to talk about not just what a typical episode is composed of, but what a typical episode means.  A typical episode is an episode of a show that operates by the most default narrative mode available and doesn't attempt to subvert it in any way.  For example, on the show Doctor Who, the default mode is the Doctor engaging with a sci-fi premise in an exciting way that puts himself and his companion in peril, so a typical episode would be something like 42, in which a spaceship is in danger because it's being attacked by possessed crew members and the Doctor and his companion are stuck on it.

A "typical episode" is not a label intended as an insult.  They're necessary for any show to function.  Typical episodes are also perfectly able to do unique things, as long as they work within a very rigid framework.

In Wizard, the most unusual aspect - which is fairly unique for the first season - is the extraordinarily high gag density.  Adventure Time has established itself as a show more willing to be humorous in an ambient way than an overt way (see the post on Slumber Party Panic).  Wizard, however, is packed to the gills with gags.  There are all the wizard powers, the haggling sequence, the rock coming to life - all of these are very rapid throwaway jokes.

I'd like to offer my usual disclaimer that it's impossible to attribute specific aspects of episodes to specific authors without explicit knowledge, but I'd also like to speculate that this has to do with the fact that this is the only episode storyboarded by Pete Browngardt, later known as the creator of Uncle Grandpa, one of the most ludicrously gag-heavy TV shows ever.

Next time:  Evicted!

I Just Need To Set Up Some Sort Of Pulley System: Memories of Boom Boom Mountain

Memories of Boom Boom Mountain aired on May 3, 2010, immediately following My Two Favorite People.  It was boarded by Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn, who had previously boarded Tree Trunks and Ricardio the Heart Guy together.

Memories of Boom Boom Mountain is Adventure Time at it's goofiest and least serious.  The episode appears to be largely an excuse for Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn to create images that they find inherently funny - for example, a bunch of brawlers using animals like geese and rats as boxing gloves.

That's not to say the episode doesn't have a narrative.  It's just that the narrative is structured around goofy interludes.  In this episode, the basic problem is that a group of brawlers in a village like to roughhouse, but the mountain overlooking the village doesn't like watching them roughhouse because it makes him sad.  Finn attempts to remedy this problem through a variety of means: the aforementioned animal boxing gloves, convincing the fighters to pet one another instead of fighting, flipping the mountain 180 degrees.  However, all of these schemes ultimately fail.

In this episode, we also learn Finn's traumatic backstory that explains why he's a hero.  Of course, this is easily the most ridiculous part of the episode.  The sequence consciously pastiches a typical tragic backstory sequence both in the narrative being told and the visuals - note Finn's dramatic separation from the crowd of onlookers:  

(It's worth mentioning briefly that Finn's backstory does ultimately answer a lingering question.  It's established by this point that Finn and Jake are brothers, but more specifics haven't been forthcoming.  Here, it's revealed that Finn was taken in by Jake's parents at a young age.)

Most importantly, however, as a result of his past, Finn has taken a vow help anyone, no matter how small their problems may be.  This episode pushes Finn and his naive idealism to the limit and he seems to be on the verge of realizing that it's impossible to help everyone all the time after being barraged with a huge array of contradictory requests for help.  

However, the show doesn't follow this route.  Instead, it very abruptly stops challenging Finn's desire to help everyone.  Finn constructs a Rube Goldberg machine that simultaneously solves every problem.  While this is a neat bit of design from Youn and Jimenez, it also opens the episode up to an enormous critique: that the episode doesn't resolve its narrative satisfactorily and it doesn't cause Finn's character to grow.  To put it more bluntly, the episode feels like a cop-out.  

However, there is a more generous reading.  Adventure Time is a show that's very much driven by its aesthetic and philosophical concerns, which at this point I'd happily oversimplify as "active" and "optimistic" respectively.  Punishing Finn for his naïveté and desire to help goes against everything Adventure Time stands for.  Choosing to provide Finn with a way out can be seen as the show taking a strong philosophical stand against pessimism and cynicism.

Next time:  Wizard. 

Get Out Of My Life, Tiffany: My Two Favorite People

My Two Favorite People aired on May 3, 2010.  It was storyboarded by Pen Ward and Kent Osborne.
This episode starts off in pretty typical Adventure Time fashion - Finn and Jake are fighting a science cat and a sword shark and having a great time.  Then something happens that, as of yet, hasn't happened in Adventure Time.  Jake leaves to go see Lady Rainicorn and we follow him, leaving Finn behind.

This is more important than it seems.  Despite receiving basically equal billing with Finn in the title sequence, so far the series has been much more Finn-heavy than Jake-heavy, and this is the first episode that focuses squarely on Jake's character.  Finn, on the other hand, has had several episodes of this nature, with Slumber Party Panic, the Enchiridion, and Ricardio the Heart Guy making one third of the show thus far about Finn specifically.

On the one hand, this episode is strategically necessary.  When writing a show, you've got to prove eventually that all of your primary characters are capable of supporting independent plots on their own.  Here, Ward and Osborne do that with Jake.

Despite the fact that Jake has never been the main focus of an episode before, his personality is pretty well-known by regular viewers of the show by this point.  Jake tends to be much more laid-back than the comparatively high-energy Finn, and more prone to simple actions and passivity.  In this episode, all of these qualities work together to create the worst version of Jake possible before he is ultimately redeemed at the end of the episode.  Jake's simplicity of thought causes him to fail to anticipate any negative consequences of bringing Finn and Lady together, and then his passivity becomes passive-aggressiveness as he is bothered by Finn and Lady's behavior but is not able to deal with it in a healthy way, coming to a head in his plan to make both Lady and Finn jealous by hanging out with Tiffany.

This episode is also the first substantial look at Lady as a character.  While she'd been onscreen before, it was typically with very little context.  In this episode, however, she's shown as an adventurer who can hold her own with Finn and Jake, even if her personality is at this point somewhat thinly sketched.

Next Time:  Memories of Boom Boom Mountain.

Been Frozen So Long: Business Time

Business Time aired immediately after Ricardio the Heart Guy on April 26, 2010.  It was boarded by Luther McLaurin and Armen Mirzaian, who previously boarded The Jiggler.

Now is the time to begin talking about the apocalypse in Adventure Time.  This is the first episode to explicitly indicate that the world of Adventure Time is a post-apocalyptic one.  However, it's very much worth pointing out that Adventure Time has been an implicitly post-apocalyptic show from the very, very beginning; the first image the show chooses to ever show its audience is this:

A field strewn with abandoned technology and unexploded bombs.  However, it isn't until its eighth episode that it even begins to deal somewhat with this idea, and here only very, very glancingly, to the extent that the apocalypse can't really be the way into this episode.  So we'll start somewhere else and work our way back to the apocalypse from there.

What's interesting about Business Time is how much it follows the model McLaurin and Mirzaian laid out in The Jiggler, and yet how it manages to have so much more thematic depth.  Both episodes follow the structure of Finn and Jake finding something convenient to them that they try to exploit which leads to horrific consequences, ultimately forcing them to restore the status quo to that of the beginning of the episode.  In The Jiggler, it's the jiggler, and in this episode it's the businessmen.

The businessmen are endlessly fascinating.  First of all, their very physical appearance is pretty horrifying - they resemble nothing more than zombies and appear to have barnacles living on their flesh.  However, the businessmen are also used as incredibly comic characters.

A lot of this has to do with how much the episode plays with the "frozen caveman" trope that's a staple of American cartoons.  The episode trades in large part on the absurdity of replacing a caveman with a businessman in this specific context, going so far as to have the businessmen speak in the truncated language that's become associated with cavemen in popular culture.  

However, it's not enough that cavemen and businessmen don't belong together.  This is Adventure Time, which loves nothing more than surreal mixes of genres and storytelling styles.  The episode also makes a lot of hay from the absurdity of businessmen unleashed in Adventure Time's fantasy landscape.  The show gets quite a few good sight gags out of this, particularly the business men researching Finn and Jake's battle techniques while eating donuts and drinking coffee on a hillside, or the businessmen decked out with armor and weapons trying to defeat some battlecubes.

However, these characters have more to them than goofiness and body horror.  The businessmen are also just fundamentally really sad.  In the process of being frozen, they've had their identities stripped away and lost everything besides their most basic instincts - business.

This also leads into something else.  By the end, the businessmen have become a source of existential horror - not just threats to Finn and Jake's adventuresome spirit, but threats to freedom and happiness throughout Ooo.  

So what is the horror that the businessmen represent?  The seemingly obvious answer - capitalism - is incorrect; the businessmen, despite their iconography, have absolutely nothing to do with markets of any kind.  Instead, the businessmen seem to have one very specific goal: efficiency.  Their solution to the problem of rescuing people and adventuring is to create a horrifying authoritarian system in which everyone is literally sealed inside a glass bubble.  This is the source of the horror of the businessmen - they represent stasis and absolute fixity, in complete and total opposition to growth and development.

Which brings us back to Adventure Time's conception of the apocalypse.  While it's clear that Adventure Time takes place in a world that's undergone some kind of cataclysmic nuclear war, it's also clear that Ooo isn't really a bad place.  Life goes on.  There's plenty of joy and happiness.  Ooo has managed to grow and adapt to the horrifying circumstances of the world and fill it with kindness and life.  

Next time:  My Two Favorite People.

More Powerful Than Lesser Villains: Ricardio the Heart Guy

Ricardio the Heart Guy aired on April 26, 2010.   It was boarded by Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn.

Since I barely talked about them during their last appearance, it really is time to talk about the two boarders of this episode, Bert Youn and Sean Jimenez, because they're an incredibly important and unique team for the first season of Adventure Time.

Bert Youn went to CalArts at the same time as Pat McHale and Pen Ward, and certainly knew McHale, as McHale voices a character in one of Youn's student films.  However, this is not why Youn is important.  Youn is important because he has an incredibly specific artistic quirk - his penchant for grotesquely detailed extreme close-ups, such as the one used as the primary image for this post.  This crops up numerous times throughout the episode and is evident in Ricardio's basic, bizarrely detailed character design, which is frequently commented on by Jake throughout the episode.  Finn is also rendered in this way:

However, that's not to downplay the contributions of the other boarder, Sean Jimenez.  Jimenez's style is less easy to pull apart than Youn's, but later in his career Jimenez became the background designer for Gravity Falls, a job that requires a large degree of craftsmanship.  I say this because Ricardio the Heart Guy is the most artistically complex episode of Adventure Time thus far.

(I do want to quickly emphasize once again that it's impossible to accurately separate exactly what each of these two artists has done in a given episode.)

To begin with, this story is capable of shifting modes and visual storytelling techniques very quickly, and it does so through references to the history of film.  During the party scene near the beginning of the episode, everything is composed in the fairly typical Adventure Time house style, with very straightforward framing, composition, and background work:

This is much like the framing in Slumber Party Panic, with the two primary subjects given plenty of space in the center of the frame.  However, when Finn and Jake decide to investigate Ricardio for being evil, the episode starts referencing the style of German Expressionism and Film Noir.  German Expressionism as a movement in film emphasized the subjective and emotional realities of what was being filmed instead of attempting realism.  This can be seen in movies such as "the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari:"

Note in particular the oddly angled and incredibly unrealistic buildings.  This is referenced in the background design of Ricardio the Heart Guy:  

Film Noir as a genre of film was very much an extension of the German Expressionist aesthetic; two of its calling cards were long, impossible shadows and oblique angles, often emphasizing the discomfort or unease of a situation.  Consider these examples from "I Confess" and "the Third Man."

The episode uses this to signal that Ricardio is, in fact, a villain, despite what Princess Bubblegum thinks.

Which brings us to our usual line of complaint against this season - the casual sexism.  In this episode, Princess Bubblegum is made a damsel in distress on two separate occasions.  She shows no attempts to escape, and she seems completely helpless.  This jars significantly with the hyperintelligent scientist we are presented with in Slumber Party Panic, but it squares unfortunately with the pilot.  This is an aspect of Adventure Time that must be exorcised. 

Also of note within the story is the moving forward of the "will they/won't they" romance between Finn and PB the creative team has been playing with since the first episode.  It is at its most explicit here, with both parties affectively acknowledging the nature of Finn's feelings towards Bubblegum, which are much less clear.  

The type of storytelling Adventure Time is doing at this point tends to be light, but not independent, of season-long arcs.  This, then, is the first real episode that depends heavily on having seen several of the previous series' episodes.  Ice King, for example, barely enters the story, despite the fact that his heart is the central antagonist. 

It's interesting to discover that Adventure Time, when first pitched, was envisaged as a heavily serialized show.  However, this was not agreed upon by the network, and so the creative team was forced to abandon this show.

Next time:  Business Time.  

I Think He's Trying to Tell Us Something: The Jiggler

The Jiggler aired on April 19, 2010, immediately following the Enchiridion.  It was boarded by Luther McLaurin and Armen Mirzaian and was the debut storyboard for both artists.

Something interesting to note about this episode is that Finn and Jake are the only characters who speak the entire time.  This episode is also the first episode to not introduce or return to any major recurring characters.  Because of this, the episode puts a lot of weight on Finn and Jake.

In order to balance out the Finn/Jake dynamic, the status quo is interrupted by the appearance of the Jiggler, a small dancing creature who doesn't speak.  Finn and Jake quickly adopt it and take it back to the treehouse so it can perform for them whenever they want.  However, things go awry.

In case you're thinking that this sounds like a moral message episode, you're absolutely right,  but there's one important thing to get out of the way first:  the body horror.  McLaurin and Mirzaian go for the total decontextualization of human faces by having Finn and Jake stick eyeballs and eyepatches into the Jiggler's eyes.

Though Adventure Time hinted towards body horror before – Slumber Party Panic in particular - this was the first time that it really went all-out to the extent that it does.  The jiggler's spraying pseudo-blood across Finn and Jake's floor before it accidentally bursts and gets its body everwhere is deeply unpleasant.

This body horror ties perfectly into the moral message of the episode.  At a kind of crude level, it appears to be some kind of updated version of the myth that baby birds' mothers will push them out of the nest if they've touched any humans.  However, a deeper examination of the episode reveals layers about exploitation, friendship, and selfishness.  In particular, these flaws belong to Finn.

Throughout the episode, Finn repeatedly either denies that there are any problems or gives in completely to defeatism and despair.  A lot of this comes from confusion, which the Jiggler's body horror communicates so effectively.  All Finn wanted was essentially a dancing robot, and instead he ended up with a being that has needs which he can't even begin to comprehend.  In this episode, Finn, though somewhat well-intentioned, comes our looking much worse than Jake.

Jake, on other hand, successfully keeps a cool head throughout and is the source of every good action he and Finn take.  For the first time, we see Jake as the primary hero instead of Finn.  This is an interesting way to keep the show fresh, particularly when compared with the last episode, which was all about Finn's heroics.  Here, the show is much more concerned with Jake's calm demeanor and wise actions.

But all of this contradicts another quite recent episode.  Tree Trunks had a moral message, but it was extremely clear how ambivalent the show felt about pushing that moral judgment.  However, these storyboarders appear to have no qualms about putting the moral message directly in the show with no qualifications at all.

This can easily explained by the fact that different storyboarding teams interpret Pen Ward's land of Ooo very differently.  Youn and Jimenez see Pen Ward's vision as fundamentally chaotic, while McLaurin and Mirzaian view appears to bet that of a world getting on with stuff in a pretty mechanical way.

So, despite the theoretical aesthetic unification of the whole series, it's very much possible for things to slip through the cracks.  All in all, this makes for a more interesting show.  Next Time:  Ricardio the Heart Guy.

That's How Most People Get In: The Enchiridion

The Enchiridion aired on April 19, 2010.  It was boarded by Adam Muto, Pendleton Ward, and Patrick McHale.

Despite airing in the fifth slot, the Enchiridion was actually the first episode to enter production and initially intended to be the first episode of the show.  This actually makes a good deal of sense when watching it; in some ways, this hews even closer to the style of the pilot than Prisoners of Love, which took the pilot as a starting point and reconfigured it.  What the Enchiridion does is essentially make a sequel to the pilot.  This sensibility is evident through the heavy emphasis on goofy dances, bizarre obstacles, surreal interludes, and mock-fantasy dialogue, in this case Princess Bubblegum's discussion of heroism and the Enchiridion with Finn.  Similarly, Mannish Man the minotaur functions as a kind of loving parody of genre masculinity, something very much in the mileu of the pilot.

But we've already discussed the pilot.  We've already discussed Adventure Time's early use of fantasy elements, and we've already talked about what it means to begin a show.  Now is not the time to revisit any of this stuff.  Instead, it's time to talk about the specific group of people who storyboarded this episode and what they mean for the show as a whole.

This episode was storyboarded by, as previously mentioned, Adam Muto, Pendleton Ward, and Patrick McHale.  Ward we've discussed; McHale and Muto have largely slipped by us unnoticed.

This makes more sense for McHale.  This is McHale's first and last board, although it is by no means his first or last contribution to the show.  McHale is credited as the show's creative director for its first five seasons.  He has been described by Tom Herpich, a season one character designer and future storyboarder, as "the most unsung of Adventure Time's original architects."  However, this provides us with very little information as to what McHale's contributions actually were.  We'll look more at McHale as a creative figure when it's time to talk about Over the Garden Wall.

Muto, on the other hand, is much more present.  He's co-storyboarded three of the five episodes this blog has covered so far, and yet it is almost impossible to tease out his creative influence from that of the other storyboarders.  He goes on to co-storyboard eight more episodes in this season alone.  We'll talk more about Muto at a later date as well.

And so, despite attempting to look at these two figures, we're left looking directly back at Ward again.  Why is this?  It's time for a Grand Thesis on Season One of Adventure Time.

The thesis is as follows:  Ward aside, season one of Adventure Time is not a season of visionary artists bending the show to their own whims and wills.  Instead, this season's storyboard artists seek to fully implement and express the desires of Pen Ward.

On the Inkstuds podcast, Ward states that he originally conceived Adventure Time as script-driven, so that he could have more consistent control of everything to do with the show.  Adam Muto says in the Conversation Parade podcast that one original idea for the show was a weekly serial.  All of this speaks to the wish Ward had to present his artistic vision for the world by nailing it down completely.  Despite the fact that the show never became a script-driven serial, season one's artists all decided to follow the wisdom of Pen Ward anyway.  Next Time:  this Jiggler.

Look At My Jacked Up Face: Tree Trunks

Tree Trunks aired on April 12, 2010, directly following Prisoners of Love.  It was boarded by Bert Youn and Sean Jimenez.

In broadcasting terms, this episode makes a lot of sense.  While Finn and Jake were present in Prisoners of Love (which, it's important to remember, was specifically paired with this one), they were not the main focus; that episode was basically a character piece for the Ice King.  Here, Finn and Jake take center stage in an episode that spends a lot of time developing their individual personalities and their relationship.

We've seen three "Finn and Jake go adventuring" episodes, so this episode's primary innovation is to put Finn and Jake in a deeply uncomfortable place while maintaining their usual style of adventure.  To this end, the show creates Tree Trunks, a very small, old, yellow elephant, who loves apples and apple pie and is voiced by Polly Lou Livingston, an old family friend of Pendleton Ward.

Tree Trunks is involved through a straightforward McGuffin – the Crystal Gem Apple, a mythical apple that grows in, as Tree Trunks puts it, "the deepest end of the evil, dark forest."  Tree Trunks desires nothing more in the world than to try this apple, and Finn and Jake offer to accompany her on an adventure.

However, Tree Trunks is bad at adventuring, and Finn and Jake are forced to take care of her instead of easily defeating the monsters in the evil, dark forest.  Finn and Jake respond to this in very different ways.  Finn becomes more and more upset, his initial doubts increasing as Tree Trunks increasingly proves herself dangerously incompetent.  Finn ultimately delivers a frustrated speech to Tree Trunks in which he says that she's not an adventurer, which makes Tree Trunks begin crying.

Finn's actions are used to demonstrate his active and forceful personality.  He can't stand to see Tree Trunks put in danger and is frustrated by her failure to listen to his warnings.

Jake, on the other hand, seems decidedly unconcerned with Tree Trunks.  He initially dispels Finn's worries by repeating the phrase "it's fine" over and over again, allows Tree Trunks to enter the fray when specifically warned not to by Finn, and seems to be happily humoring her when she believes she helped defeat a monster when in reality she just put herself in grave danger.  This establishes Jake as a relaxed character who is happy to let others make the major decisions.

It's precisely these differences that clearly elucidate, for the first time, why Finn and Jake make a good team.  They balance out each others' specific character problems, but are similar enough to have an enormous and believable amount of kinship.

Aside from its character work, this episode does interesting things with morality.  So far, the episodes we've discussed haven't really had coherent moral messages.  Tree Trunks, however, is consciously structured as a "message episode," something immediately recognizable to anyone who grew up watching cartoons.  In these types of stories, the protagonists are presented with a moral conundrum from which they ultimately learn a valuable lesson and achieve a happy ending.  Adventure Time seems set to fulfill this, making two apparent arguments:  that you shouldn't be too harsh with your friends and that not all conflicts can be solved by violence.

However, the show cheerfully undercuts this by failing to provide a straightforwardly happy ending.  Our heroes achieve their goal in finding the Crystal Gem Apple and Tree Trunks takes a bite from it and then abruptly explodes, leaving Finn and Jake in complete shock.  We are then shown a brief clip of a laughing Tree Trunks running through some kind of crystal cavern.  The episode fails to provide any context or reaction to this, and the status quo appears to be completely reset in the next episode.

What this demonstrates is that the people writing the show aren't comfortable with simple and easily digested moral messages, and that even when they adopt the moral message structure, they end up subverting it in bizarre ways.

Next time:  the Enchiridion.

I Hope They Think I'm Fun: Prisoners of Love

This is the first story to air on April 12, 2010.  It's called Prisoners of Love and was boarded by Adam Muto and Pendleton Ward.  

This itself is interesting.  So far, Muto has been a co-boarder in every Adventure Time episode we've seen.  This has the odd effect of making Muto's contributions to the show very hard to determine at this point, but we'll look into that more later.  

The most significant thing about Prisoners of Love is the degree to which it's a reconfiguration of the original pilot.  Both the snow golem and the Iceclops from the pilot make brief cameos here, as does a sequence in which Finn and Jake sled down a snowy hill accompanied by penguins.  The plot follows a similar trajectory - Finn and Jake rescue princesses from the Ice King.

The major difference, however, is that the story is restructured to put the Ice King in the spotlight.  He is no longer the mustache-twirling fantasy pastiche of the pilot; instead, he's given a very substantial character overhaul.  Crucial to this is the casting of a new voice actor.  Tom Kenny, most famous as the voice of Spongebob, lends the Ice King a sort of pathetic likability.  Despite the fact that he is, as the Cosmic Owl at the end of this episode puts it, a psychopath, Kenny's performance draws out the most sympathetic aspects of the Ice King right from the beginning – something very valuable in a primary antagonist.

The overhaul is not just limited to the voice, however.  In the pilot, the main joke about the Ice King was that he was a campy and overplayed fantasy villain, speaking in faux-medieval style and being directly and knowingly malevolent.  Here, the joke about the Ice King becomes the juxtaposition between his melodramatic fantasy role as an evil ice sorcerer and the banal reality of his personality and actions.  Despite the fact that he rules over an icy kingdom and kidnaps princesses, the Ice King is the kind of guy who fishes through trail mix for yogurt chips and complains about his bad back.  In fact, he seems completely unable to comprehend the idea that he's done anything wrong in kidnapping the princesses in the first place.  

This leads to the most straightforward critique of the episode – its casual sexism.  While typically I think Adventure Time does interesting stuff politically (moreso in the later seasons), this is a major problem here.  All the princesses are portrayed as helpless and incapable of doing anything, and it takes the masculine heroes Finn & Jake to rescue them.  One of the only significant lines from this episode's large list of female characters is Slime Princess asking Finn to marry her.  At this point, the show is still only reiterating and pastiching concepts from genre fiction and not yet critiquing them.  

To move away from negativity, however, this episode's narrative is played out in a vastly different way than in the previous two episodes we've seen.  While both of those stories had breakneck paces and thrilling adventure, the vast majority of this episode involves out heroes trapped in an icy prison cell.  In other words, the show completely abandons narrative compression here, instead just choosing a very simple and basic story that is capable of working a framework for character building.  This is the first suggestion that Adventure Time has other things in its narrative toolbox than compression, and also proves that a character piece can be fit into an 11 minute runtime.  

Ultimately, this is a flawed episode, but an extremely ambitious and important one.  Next Time:  Tree Trunks.

The Fun Will Never End, It's Adventure Time: The Pilot

Actually, it's not quite Adventure Time as we know it.  It's the pilot for Adventure Time, made in 2006, four years before the first episode proper aired.  It was written and storyboarded entirely by Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time.

Despite Ward's status as the show's creator and showrunner, we haven't really talked too much about him or what precisely his take on Adventure Time is, basically because he wasn't directly involved in storyboarding the first two episodes of the show.  The pilot, however, is all Ward, and does a lot to demonstrate Ward's unique take on the show, which truly is different from that of everyone else he brings on board.  To do this, let's compare and contrast the pilot with the first two episodes.

One aspect shared by the two Muto/Ito episodes we've seen so far is their heavy grounding in settings.  Slumber Party Panic explores the Candy Kingdom and its denizens in great detail; Trouble in Lumpy Space does the same with Lumpy Space.  Both stories draw a lot from the inherent character of their settings - the innocent foolishness of the Candy People is integral to the first story's plot, much as the fact that Lumpy Space is a grotesque version of a teen dramedy is integral to the second episode's.

Ward is not particularly interested in settings in the pilot for Adventure Time.  The majority of the landscapes are rolling, grassy hills with little in the way of specific character, and the Ice Kingdom seems mostly to just be where the Ice King lives, not a setting the episode is particularly rooted in.  Instead, Ward is largely interested in plot and character, albeit in very specific ways.

The episode's plot is an incredibly basic one - a princess is kidnapped by an evil wizard, and a hero saves this damsel in distress.  All of this is played very straight, with the exception of our two main characters, Pen and Jake.  Pen and Jake are agents of chaos that interrupt the typical fantasy melodrama.  For example, the Ice King, a very typical fantasy villain, speaks here in a very overwrought and cod-medieval way, saying stuff like "foul and noisome whelp!  You've not seen the last of my wintery fangs!"  Pen and Jake, on the other hand, continuously refer to one another as "bro" and "dude," while speaking in a heavily stylized way that could be roughly described as 2006 informal.

The influence is very easy to put together with a little outside information.  Pendleton Ward is an enormous fan of Dungeons and Dragons and can be quoted as saying "when I'm writing an episode it feels like I'm playing D&D with the characters."  Combine this with the fact that, in the pilot, the protagonist is named Pen, the literal first name of the person writing the show, and it's clear that Pen Ward sees Adventure Time (or at least the 2006 version) as a fantasy playground to mess around in, including all the archetypes like evil wizards and kidnapped princesses.

This is important to note, given that stuff like gender politics and typical fantasy roles will later become very important to Adventure Time.  It is not yet important here.  The pilot may inherit the sexist damsel-in-distress plotline from the fantasy paperbacks that are a clear influence on both Ward and Dungeons and Dragons, but the episode doesn't do anything to critique the idea of the hapless, kidnapped woman who is totally without power.  Slumber Party Panic, however, instantly scraps this idea altogether, showing Princess Bubblegum as a scientist first and a monarch second.

However, it's equally telling to look at the important aspects that are retained from this pilot in the TV show itself.  The show is not at all afraid to take a few seconds out of its very short running time to show Pen and Jake doing a little dance, or to show Jake discussing viola playing with Lady Rainicorn while Pen fights the Ice King, or to bring in a lost Fire Elemental demanding directions to the sun.

It's this very inclination towards off-topic goofiness that is at the heart and soul of what Adventure Time is doing in its first season.  Next time:  Prisoners of Love.

Hey, Dude - We Made It: Trouble in Lumpy Space

Following the end of Slumber Party Panic's original airing on Cartoon Network, Adventure Time continues directly into its next episode, Trouble in Lumpy Space, also storyboarded by Elizabeth Ito and Adam Muto.

Because of Cartoon Network's policy of airing two eleven-minute episodes in one half hour timeslot, Adventure Time essentially gets two unusual opportunities:  winning over viewers who were unimpressed with Slumber Party Panic and bringing on viewers who were intrigued but not completely sold on the show's concept.

The show goes about doing this by demonstrating Adventure Time's breadth.  While Slumber Party Panic focuses entirely on the Candy Kingdom, Trouble in Lumpy Space takes place in, well, Lumpy Space, a very different environment from the candy kingdom.  Ito and Muto also tell a very different story, focusing on developing the relationship between the show's two main characters, Finn and Jake.  The episode's plot largely consists of Finn attempting to find a cure for Jake's rapidly developing lumpiness.

Ito and Muto choose to use the same basic tools they used in the previous episode.  The narrative is very tightly compressed.  Jake contracts the lumps through a beautifully contrived opening sequence in which Lumpy Space Princess accidentally bounces off of a giant marshmallow, causing her to land teeth-first on Jake's leg.  Within two minutes, the episode's conflict is completely set up - Finn and Jake must head to Lumpy Space to get an antidote and use it before sundown, or Jake will become a lumpy person forever.

This plot is compellingly handled, but it's not the most important thing about the episode.  In fact, this episode has a lot of important aspects.  As previously mentioned, it puts a lot of effort into expanding the Finn/Jake relationship.  This relationship was there in Slumber Party Panic, but it took a background role to Finn's development and the main plot.  Here, the relationship is firmly in the foreground, with a slight wrinkle - Jake still occupies the background role.  We are shown Finn and Jake's friendship largely through Finn's eyes, with Jake spending a large chunk of the episode as Lumpy Jake.

The narrative compression used in the first episode is present here, as well, but it's used to much different effect.  While in the first episode it allowed Muto and Ito to define the world of Adventure Time in broad strokes, here it allows them to focus on minute details.  The bizarre world of Lumpy Space is explored thoroughly, with details like the Smooth Posers being given a surprising amount of screentime.

This also helps develop the key secondary character in this episode:  Lumpy Space Princess.  Lumpy Space Princess, voiced by show creator Pendleton Ward, is a superficial and self-absorbed pastiche of the "popular girl" as seen in movies like Heathers and Mean Girls.  Part of the humor in Lumpy Space Princess's character is the absurdity inherent in sticking this teen movie staple in a fantasy world and covering it in purple lumps, but interestingly, the show takes a lot of opportunities to make us feel bad for her.  In this episode, for example, after being yelled at by Finn for ruining Jake's chances at getting the antidote, she delivers a speech about how Finn and Jake are supposed to be her "real friends."  While the speech itself is exactly the kind of trite pseudo-powerful moment Lumpy Space Princess fundamentally lampoons, her delivery of it is so incredibly pathetic that it's difficult to not feel bad for her.

But it's time to focus on something else, which is incredibly important and which thus far I've kind of skirted around.  Both episodes of Adventure Time we've discussed so far have been storyboarded by Adam Muto and Elizabeth Ito, and I've said nothing at all about either of them.  It's time to tackle the question of authorship in Adventure Time.

To do so, we must look at the basic process of production.  From what I've cobbled together from a variety of interviews, articles, and speeches, the basic process is that ideas and basic episode sketches are brainstormed by all the storyboarders working on the show.  These sketches are then handed off to the show's writing staff, who turn it into a two-page outline, which is then handed back to the storyboarding teams (typically two or three people), who choose outlines if they're interested in the premise.  The storyboarding teams then flesh this outline out into an episode by composing every shot and writing all the dialogue through a 200-page, 400-drawing storyboard.

It's clear that the brunt of the creative work is done by the storyboard artists.  In this and in the last episode, our two storyboard artists have been Elizabeth Ito and Adam Muto.  Muto is a close friend of Ward's and one of the people who attended the California Institute of the Arts (or CalArts) at roughly the same time, who I'll be talking about more later.  Ito also appears to have attended CalArts at roughly the same time, and had previously worked on Phineas and Ferb at the Disney Channel.

Because episodes are so rarely storyboarded by one person, it's very difficult to try to untie the knot of the storyboarding team.  It's more useful to treat each team as an author unto itself and see the commonalities between the team's episodes, at least at this point.

However, it's very difficult to pinpoint what exactly Ito and Muto are doing, even as a team.  While the show and a lot of the characters were created by Pendleton Ward, as of yet the audience has no experience of Adventure Time being written by anyone other than the combination of Adam Muto and Elizabeth Ito.  Only two episodes have aired, both written by the same team.  As far as the audience is concerned, everything that they're doing is emblematic of the show as a whole at this point.

That's all going to change next time, as we look at our first piece of Adventure Time not written by either Muto or Ito, but instead solely by Pendleton Ward.  Next time:  the original pilot.