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.