“Monster Manual” the plots include classic quest-style puzzles-find the gems, open the portal! In the hand-drawn pastel backgrounds and the characters’ bubble eyes, there are hints of Japanese animation-Ward has cited the Hayao Miyazaki movie “My Neighbor Totoro” as an inspiration-but the aesthetic feels equally informed by the urbane squiggles of Felix the Cat, the jolting aggression of early Mickey Mouse cartoons, and the bratty buddy energy of series like “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Ren & Stimpy.” Many of the villains, like the skeletal Lich, have visual origins in the old D. In interviews, Pendleton Ward, the show’s creator, has laid out some of his influences, including the role-playing game that was the leisure-time activity of my own nerdy teens, the dice-and-paper-based Dungeons & Dragons.
There are moments when Finn’s story feels suspiciously like a compensatory fantasy, invented to disguise a trauma that can’t be faced head on-as if it were the “Mulholland Drive” of children’s television. Finn is the only character who ages in a normal fashion: he began as a twelve-year-old, but this season he’s sixteen, and his relationships, and the show itself, have become deeper and (codedly) more sexual. In later seasons, these threads cohere into a broader cosmology it includes an alternate time line, in which the bombs haven’t yet exploded. At the age of seven, she was rescued by Simon, but once he became the cackling Ice King he forgot he ever knew her.Īs with “The Simpsons,” the ensemble is enormous, allowing episodes to go off on odd detours and tell the stories of minor figures, such as the woozy Southern elephant named Tree Trunks or the freaky Lemongrabs, lemon-headed maniacs who spend most of their time howling in frustration or the friendly Korean-accented computer named B.M.O. The punk-goth vampire Marceline has a mobster-like dad, who rules an underworld called the Nightosphere, but she, too, wandered alone in a postwar landscape as a child. The sociopathic Ice King, who keeps trying to kidnap princesses and marry them, used to be a gentle antiquarian named Simon, a personality he lost while fighting mutants after the war, when a magic crown drove him crazy. The other major characters have their own disturbing origin stories. The candy-tinted world we’re seeing has a terrible history: while Finn is surrounded by magical beings, virtually every other human appears to have been killed or transformed, during something called the Mushroom War, which included, according to one unnerving voice-over, “frightful bombs poised to bathe the land in mutogenic horror.” As a baby, Finn was left on a leaf, crying and alone. Eventually, one of the stalks produces evil piglets, and Finn and Jake defeat the beings using a novel method that involves ice cream.”īut, as the series progresses, an eerie backstory emerges. Online summaries make it sound like a wacky romp: “Finn and Jake are assigned to watch three magical beans two of the beans are innocent, but one of them is evil. . . . Finn and Jake’s friendship has a classic nerd-and-his-id dynamic, a bit like Calvin and Hobbes, in which a wild animal encourages his friend to go on adventures and cheers him on with girls (among them, the scientist-princess Princess Bubblegum). For no clear reason, Jake can stretch to any length and alter his body, extending his front leg to make a bridge, blowing up to mountain size, or turning himself into an armchair.
When it began, in 2010, “Adventure Time” stuck more closely to a familiar formula, in which a good-hearted human boy named Finn and his dog, Jake, a gruff-voiced wingman type, were brought up as siblings. If that sounds pretentious, there’s definitely a simpler way to watch the show: as a cartoon about a hero who fights villains, with fun violence, the occasional fart joke, and a slight edge of Bushwick cool-kid hipness.
The show’s foreground is jaunty, but its background hints at a ruined world.