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.
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