Cartoon Break

I don’t have time for breaks unless they’re carelessly and pointlessly mixed with half-assed work for hours at a time. With that in mind, I’ve only gotten in around 36 hours of cartoons in the past week, so I’m definitely slacking. Here’s what I’ve watched.

1. All of Adventure Time

I watched all of Adventure Time up to the present. It’s good. It does a lot of things right and not a lot wrong. A.T.’s writers tell the story how they want, when they want, with all the adult jokes they want, and nobody can stop them. The universe is set up brilliantly as a toy box where any amount of deus ex machina just makes sense, but the characters aren’t merely leaves blowing around in the narrative wind. Adventure Time is not afraid to build its characters in meaningful and permanent ways that aren’t often attempted in children’s cartoons. Finn and Jake, as the “main” characters, are not the straw personalities the cartoon wold has gotten used to. Too often, shows fall back on a cast of stereotypes, where each character is a tool to play out some fixed characteristic and then disappear when they aren’t necessary. Not so in Adventure Time, where characters are uniquely flawed in unexpected ways, and their personalities are never throw-away gags. Finn has run-ins with existentialism, relative morality, love, rejection, and abandonment in just the first season, and it all works together to construct who he becomes in the later episodes. Pendleton Ward does a great job working this development into the show without breaking the wild, adventurous tone. No matter what happens in the Land of Ooo, Adventure Time always makes you want more. The universe has an overwhelming amount of wacky, cartoonish lore that it somehow manages to stay internally consistent. I could go on about the beautiful and simplistic art, the clean, fluid animation, the multi-layered humor, or the excellent voice work, but those speak for themselves.

It’s got some downsides that are worth pointing out – namely its treatment of female characters and overuse of drama arcs. The plot also takes dive a few episodes into season 5, where it loses sight of the original “toy box” structure and spirals into introspection and character specials. When it comes to women, A.T. tries to play it’s “damsel in distress” clichés off as a joke, but never really subverts them. The writers made Princess Bubblegum into a supergenius as a consolation prize for her use as… well, a prize. By the second season, they start to add some intrigue to her story, but the Mary Sue treatment proved impossible to undo completely. Things get better when Marcelline shows up, but she doesn’t become a real character for a while. There’s something to be said for the value that “drama” arcs add the the story, but several of them stretch out over 3 or 4 episodes, and they hurt the show’s flow more than they help it’s plot.

Overall, Adventure Time earns a rating of 612p/EF#024A99, definitely a good show.

2. The new season of Archer

After breaking formula and becoming complete shit in season 5, Archer limped on to get renewed for a sixth season. I won’t sugar coat it, Archer was very bad for a year. On an unrelated note: I recently discovered that most viewers believed Archer was a straight parody of spy movies, and not an experiment that begs the question “what would James Bond be like if everyone called him out on being womanizing alcoholic?”. Of course, I had already figured that out by episode 1 since I’m a literary genius, but I wonder how the other side read into it all.

The good news: Archer is back to its old standard of “wikipedia required” puns, unnecessarily complicated transition gags, running in-jokes and over-the-top violence. Not coming into the show with a fresh pair of eyes, I can’t exactly say how it would be for someone starting from season 1, but I can advise everyone to skip season 5 unless they’re starved for content. Archer is good because it’s just plain funny; there’s not much more to be said about the writing here than there is to be said about the writing of classic SNL. It’s smart, it’s fast, and it has moments that will go down in T.V. history. Season 6, admittedly, had a slow start, but it’s really gotten back to its old intrigue.

I guess I’m supposed to say something bad about its latest episode. I don’t know. Full frontal nudity? Is that a criticism?

Archer earns a FJFJFJFJFJ/qwertyuiop in my book, definitely a buy when released on Laserdisc.

3. 13 episodes of Steven Universe

Do you love all of the most annoying and tired tropes of anime? Do you love seeing those tropes bastardized and somehow made worse by an American creator? Well, you’re going to love Steven Universe as soon as you get out of my blog and never come back.

Steven Universe is the polar opposite of Adventure time, which is kind of surprising considering that it’s creator, Rebecca Sugar, was a storyboard artist for Adventure Time and friends with Pen Ward. Where Adventure Time excels in its deep characters, endlessly surprising universe, and subtle writing, Steven Universe falls flat on its face. The show follows a half-superhero, half-human boy named Steven on his mundane almost-adventures with a team of gemstone-based alien superheroes. Nothing of note happened in the 13 episodes I watched. There has been no suggestion that the format will change. Cardboard has more depth than all of the characters stacked together. We’ve got “overprotective sister figure”, “cool sister” and “ambivalent sister” all taking part in a complex dialog that consists of them spewing 2 catchphrases and then being corrected by a third, less catchphrasey piece of advice. Steven may be the most offensively stupid agent in this universe, but that’s giving him too much credit. He has no agency. He is a corpse floating on a calm sea, bobbing up and down with the passing waves. He could be replaced in almost every episode by a sack of potatoes, and he would be more useful to the plot than he is now.

What really kills me about Steven Universe is the fandom. It has a following that was screaming “My Little Pony” to me long before I started the first episode. I was not disappointed. I mean, I was completely disappointed, but totally unsurprised. When a fandom forms around a just-OK piece of media, it’s almost always because the fans enjoy the camaraderie, not the media itself. There’s something very attractive to people about obsessing over something just because others are sharing in that obsession, but I just can’t find a place in it. Steven universe is mediocre at best with an overenthusiastic fanbase that kills whatever good it had left in it. I give it a “Crippling Emptiness” out of 5: Buy it when it comes out on nanochip implant, not before, not after.