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.