over the garden wall, episode by episode

wouldn't have expected it from me, huh

This piece is going in-depth into Over the Garden Wall, episode-by-episode, to analyze and ramble, to explore and theorize. There’s been a lot said about this show, there’s been a lot to be said about this show, and I’ve spent a couple weeks scraping together some research here and some notes there in hopes of creating something of definitive document around this fascinating small curio of a show which I’ve grown to love more with the passing seasons.

This piece is also, notably, is to be a living document of sorts. With Substack’s edit feature in mind, I’ll be adding two episodes’ worth of analysis every Thursday along with my usual posts. I expect for this post to be properly finished by the end of November.

I also plan on returning to this post every fall to comprehensively overhaul and contribute more and more to the analysis. In five years’ time, I do expect this post to be eventually the length of a short novel. Here’s hoping. This also means that, if you’re not a paid subscriber now, you might be in a year or two, — it’s something to come back to, hopefully, — and then it’ll be all yours when you need it.

Prelude

A piano begins to play… in your memory… there’s a motif…

“Led through the mist by the milk-light of moon, all that was lost is revealed. Our long bygone burdens, mere echoes of the spring. But where have we come and where shall we end?”

You walk through a forest of dark and unfamiliar trees. Swirling amber. Swirling leaves. The decaying dust of a bountiful summer bounding over rocks, over sand, over hills, under boughs swinging with the wind, over the buildings, through the cracks in the hand-blown window of a victorian cottage, over the garden wall to you and your nose sniffing — snff snff achooooo (seismic)— and inhaling with the certainty inherent to such a moment as autumn, not quite a season in itself but a transferring of hands between the uncertainties of summer and the desolations of winter. Who’s to say.

“If dreams can’t come true then why not pretend? How the gentle wind beckons through the leaves, as autumn… colors… fall.”

The aspirations, touchstones, well-wishes, hopes and dreams of the spring begin to fade. Where are we now? What is this place where we’ve found ourselves walking if not summertime’s grave? The tomb of our moment of emergence into this world way back in Spring?

Life and death is a mystery to you and, — well, maybe we’re not so alone, — it’s a mystery to your sibling too, who’s toddling along, asking about potential names for this frog he found in a bush before… before… you can’t stand to remember… You don’t want to be here, but you don’t really want to be back there either. You can’t help but feel you’ve burnt that bridge. Oh well. Moving on. But your sibling isn’t yet old enough to ask such questions about the nature of reality. You know better than most, though. You lost your father. You play clarinet and write poetry. Something in there has to make you wise, right?

In this strange forest, someone who looks like Washington Irving walks past. Not that you would know what Washington Irving looks like. But you could imagine what Washington Irving looks like. Maybe it’s a costume. It is near Halloween, after all. Probably, it’s a costume. A small part of you worries and glances back at him swaggering away in his petticoat. Washington Irving would be a good name for the frog. “Yeah!” says your brother.

Something about this place unnerves you. Something about the trees; how hollow they are; how they make faces; how the wind howls through their branches, — where are you?

The rich wear powdered wigs here. Contracts are formed by yarn. The fashions you see in people on the side of the path are from the 1790s, and hunting boots are from the 1850s, and then a casual gown from the 1910s on a woman with a transatlantic accent. How odd. The costumes seem maybe too historically accurate for halloween costumes.

And the roads are dirt; the carriages are pulled by horses; songs are sung at taverns of inhabitants from the United States’ colonial era, with a great shaggy dog asleep against the door. Harvest festivals are celebrated with open arms and carved gourds aplenty; a bluebird begins to speak from the branches above, attempting to to sell you on a “good witch of the pastures.”

Nothing here makes much sense outside the cultural contexts of our shared nostalgia, that for our childhood fast fading in the realization of endings, that for our national and cultural histories melted together into a mish-mash of contexts in which symbolic unknowns come into some strange sort of focus. This is our fairy tale logic. But the fact of your being here, — why are you here? — there’s the ultimate Unknown, and these sorts of stories we tell ourselves make our being here, and our eventual not being here, digestible.

“Somewhere lost the clouded annals of history lies a place that few have seen, a mysterious place, called the unknown, where long forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood.”

The trees shed their leaves in such a sheer vital autumnal quality that winter still feels years and years away from this very moment. The nostalgia that exists in ourselves keeps the dream of never ending autumn alive while we lose our breath in the coming of winter. But Spring will bring rebirth if we can just accept the reality of it. But who wants to accept reality when there’s such a death as Winter in the middle of it all?

You talk about the mystery of where you are like you’re not already far too deep it it. You talk about the mystery of where you are like you know you’re not a part of it. You walk through this graveyard thinking the graves are trees and not markers of the countless spirits that have given up.

Good god! Have you arrived here, in this strange forest, only to be worn down? To give up your life? To die alone in the cold of winter?

That is the fear, isn’t it? There’s a minotaur in this graveyard somewhere, in the shadows of the trees, a Beast, and he’s waiting on you to stop questioning and to stop believing that to keeping breathing is worthwhile. But if this beast exists in every shadow you see in the silky dusk of late fall, doesn’t that indicate a false fear, a label placed on top of a space where we can not see for ourselves? Every life casts the afterlife as its shadow. The unknown is there. The beast only exists in our perception of it, in the words we use to describe and distort nature.

“Dancing in a swirl of golden memories, the loveliest lies of all.”

Over the Garden Wall is perhaps the best piece of fall media on the digital newsrack these days, if not for its sheer breadth of artistry then for its honest explorations into the poetic meanderings of autumn crossed with adolescence; chock full of cultural traditions, folk logic, allegoric purposes, the swirling soup of souls that exist in perpetuity with the season. Dia de Muertos is a spiritual holiday which feels chronically accurate this time of year, — don’t you feel closer to the dead in the fall?

OTGW could be written off as a children’s show, sure, but to write it off that way would be to deny the very real renaissance of American animation in the early 2010s, of which OTGW, in my mind, represents a candle-lit pinnacle: a perfect moment in which a handful of the best artists working in the animation all came together for a limited series — the early 2010s being a time when experimental, boundary pushing projects were actually funded, — came together to collaborate on a miniseries with genuine spiritual & artistic merit, well researched in its sources, well considered, and most of all, passionately felt out.

The series is tight. Each episode is eleven minutes; the series is ten episodes in total. The pace is breezy and it remains remarkable every year with every rewatch how McHale and his team pulled off such a thing; one that authentically radiates with the nostalgic air coming off from antique chromolithographs of New England in the Fall while at the very same time subliminally critiquing such a nostalgia and all the stories, those pleasant little lies, constructive or destructive, or both, that make up our understanding of our lives and their eventual ends.

Some preliminary notes on the music

Here we are more than a century and a half out from the first bits and pieces of recorded sound. Youtube, Spotify, record stores have become a graveyard haunted by the traditions of folk music, — but there’s a reassurance in their ghosts. Woodie Guthrie, Hoagy Carmichael, Art Tatum, Memphis Minnie are memories floating about the lifeblood of Americana.

Folk music has always existed in its way, only now we have recorded memories of it that we can eavesdrop in on, imagining for ourselves a pre-industrialized world of, as Overdooo Productions states in an excellent video essay, tension between the allure of faraway lands and that of personal domesticity. Here we have evidence of a long gone past (but not as far gone as it may seem) which we can’t quite seem to place in our own lives, but which we can feel deep down in our bones must have been before this, before this eternal present moment.

Over the Garden Wall feels the way it does because of the music, — Patrick McHale said so himself, — and the nostalgic attachment it holds for our vision of bygone time.

It’s the contradiction inherent to the human condition: that of an alluring horizon, wandering far from home in mysterious times and places, clashed against the desire for a homeplace, a stream to sit near and a place to feel at home within, — and the sense of recurrent loss that builds out of such opposite attractions. When listening to classic American working class folk music, African-American spirituals, classic blues, this is precisely the feeling. That contradiction resounds. Isn’t that just the American experience? Ain’t that just the way?

The original wellspring of the American folk tradition is that of black slaves in the American south, ripped from their homes and forced by threat of death into a system in which they were kept in the place of lonely wanderer without abode in a mysterious land. It’s desperately sad but these songs are also songs of hope. It’s remarkable that they’re all available to listen to if you look. Delving into old Blues recordings or Spirituals is stunning. And there’s the contradiction at the heart of OTGW’s inspirations. There’s the feeling. How did we get here? Where are we going? The old black train is a’comin’. And where this old train’s going you can’t come back from.

And this feeling of placelessness between the faraway land drawing our eye, the hopefulness of greener grass elsewhere, and the feeling of stability in the home, all poised in opposition to that question of death — it’s regained generation after generation through the anxieties of adolescence. Who hasn’t thought of themselves as born in the wrong era? Who hasn’t themselves felt amiss and out of place in their teenage years as the reality of getting older becomes clear?

This nostalgia may be tied in with the return to school after a long summer of idleness too, a moment of responsibilities reasserting themselves in our childhoods. But isn’t that also deeply intertwined with the emergence of children into the realization that death is around the corner? Such a realization is so dramatic to handle that everyone must create for themselves stories to explain such a fact as death. You either abandon hope or you move on and abandon the illusions you’ve applied to nature, that beautiful cipher from which our lives come and go. This is what OTGW is about at its most basic: the encounter with death that defines adolescence, and coming to terms with such an encounter.

Here’s a little playlist of influences mixed with the OTGW original soundtrack:

Anyways, let’s get into it…

Okay, so if you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you’ve watched the series — this entire analysis is going to be based off the reveal in episode 9 that Greg, Wirt, and the frog are transported into the Unknown by being plunged into a river after climbing over the titular garden wall and being chased off the train tracks by an incoming train.