I Don't Know, I'm Complicated: When Wedding Bells Thaw

When Wedding Bells Thaw aired on June 28, 2010, and was boarded by Kent Osborne and Niki Yang, who had previously co-storyboarded The Witch's Garden with Adam Muto.

Here we have an episode in a micro-genre that Adventure Time has already carved out for itself: an Ice King episode.  As the show's primary antagonist at this point, he's the character who gets the most development outside of Finn and Jake, and his episodes all share certain common features, most prominently that the audience basically just feels bad for the Ice King.  While he's certainly a villain, in that he does bad things and serves as the antagonist in the plot, he's a character the audience has cultivated a lot of sympathy for.

This episode pushes the audience's sympathy for the Ice King to the brink.  Sure, he's as pathetic here as ever, but unlike in other episodes, there's not much focus on his emotional state.  Instead, the episode focuses on his mental state.  He appears to not really understand that he tricked his fiancee into marriage via brainwashing, and goes through a brief period where he almost reneges on the marriage altogether.  It's very difficult to determine if the Ice King is telling the truth from his own warped perspective or if he's just lying to suit himself.

Similarly, the Ice King is also more villainous in this episode than he has been previously.  While he kidnapped a large group of princesses in Prisoners of Love, that didn't have the creepiness of mind-control, and he never got even slightly close to marrying any of his captives.

And yet, this episode also counterbalances this creepiness by showing the Ice King in a positive light for a large chunk of the episode.  It does genuinely appear throughout most of the running time that he has successfully convinced this princess to marry him.

There's also the fact that he genuinely wants Finn and Jake to be friends with him.  He's incredibly desperate for companionship, and not just from princesses; the Ice King wants desperately to be a bro.

All of this stuff stews together to make a staggeringly complex and hard to pin down character who is rigorously documented in this episode, to the point that Finn and Jake are effectively sidelined here.  We just get the most basic of characterization for the two of them - Jake being more cool-headed, Finn being desperate to protect princesses.

This episode goes the farthest into developing the Ice King as a sympathetic character and it also goes the farthest into making him seem straightforwardly villainous, which is a very impressive accomplishment.

Next time:  Dungeon.

My Bread and Butter: Ocean of Fear

Ocean of Fear aired on June 21, 2010, and was storyboarded by JG Quintel and Cole Sanchez.  This is the debut of both boarders and the only time Quintel worked on the show.

JG Quintel is better known for creating Regular Show, which debuted the season following this one; Regular Show and Adventure Time are often compared for their basic aesthetic similarities.  It's certainly worth pointing out that Quintel and Pen Ward were friends at CalArts and coworkers on Flapjack.  However, Quintel and Ward have an extremely different set of aesthetic priorities, and this episode is extremely useful in determining what those priorities are.

Ocean of Fear is successful for the same reason Regular Show is successful - it takes a relatively minor conflict (Finn's fear of the ocean) and plays it as a full-scale epic.  Thus, we get ominous synth swells, color palette shifts, extreme close-ups, distorted animation - all the things that would be expected of an episode with suitably outsized conflict, but taken out of their natural context and applied to something much smaller-scale.

The episode accomplishes the same thing through its plot.  Although the basic premise is extremely simple - Jake attempts to cure Finn of his fear of the ocean - the episode moves through a variety of different settings at quite a clip and, unusually tosses, off a lot of gags, such as Finn speaking only in rhymes or the complex hierarchy of manifestations that appear to live in Finn's digestive tract.  In this way, the episode makes its premise feel larger than it actually is.

Ocean of Fear also has some interesting wrinkles to add to the already very well worked out Finn/Jake relationship.  As usual, Finn sees Jake as a source of wisdom and advice.  However, upon having Finn's trust put in his hands, Jake proceeds to come up with an incredibly complex and devious plan to cure Finn's fear through intense exposure therapy.  Ultimately, this doesn't work as well as planned - Finn ends up accidentally trapping Jake at the bottom of the ocean.

This is where the episode pulls off its best piece of character work.  Finn realizes that his and Jake's attempts to cure his fear through their usual action-based, confrontational, heroic methods simply won't work, and he has to outwit himself in a fairly unheroic way in order to do the heroic thing.  This shows off Finn's critical thinking ability - something the show hasn't shown a lot of up to this point.

The episode ends with on of Adventure Time's stock faux-morals about flaws; however, that's not the episode's real purpose.  Ultimately, this is the most intimate character piece about Finn and Jake that the show has pulled off so far.

Next time:  When Wedding Bells Thaw

Quick Update 3

Sorry for the slow post schedule.  Last week I was busy working on other stuff, and I meant to write a new post yesterday, but I stapled my hand with an industrial stapler at work and was unable to.  Posts resume tomorrow at a slightly reduced schedule.

Quick Update 2

No weekend post again as I'm extremely busy, so apologies for that.

Also, apologies for literally falling asleep while writing last night's post and publishing something that disintegrated into complete nonsense.  Work's been very hectic this week and I'm behind on my sleep.  I've since cleaned up the ending and made it coherent and not utterly shameful.

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.