Over the Garden Wall is an animated miniseries created by Patrick McHale for Cartoon Network, Patrick McHale has worked for Cartoon Network before, you may recognise some of the shows Patrick has created including Adventure Time and The Marvellous Misadventures of Flap Jack.
The first thing that needs to be known about Over the Garden Wall is that it really is a mini series, it only consists of 10 episodes which are all approximately 12 minutes long, the shows follows the journey of two brothers Wirt and Greg who are lost in a forest and are trying to find their way home, of course from a creator of such imaginative shows the forest in Over the Garden Wall is far from ordinary, without giving away too much the two brothers meet a large array of characters including a crazy woodsman who constantly warns the boys of a creature called the Beast, a primary school of anthropomorphic animals and a woman who has been turned into a bluebird.
The art direction the designers took here is simplistic but I find that it’s the smaller touches that really make it stand out, from the above image you will notice that darker shades of colour and a heavy use of shadows really help make the imagery unique, I cant help but feel that the decision to use a lot of darker art choices was to help support the rather dark premise of the show, now that is not too say that their isn’t the occasional uplifting and happier moments in the show and when these few moments do happen the art style is more brighter with much less shadows and shading, I cant help but feel that the art style of Over the Garden Wall will become a prime example in the future of just how smaller details can help bring out such vibrant detail in many forms of art.
The voice cast is phenomenal, the majority of characters in the show are voiced by very famous actors including but not limited too Elijah Wood, John Cleese, Christopher Lloyd, Samuel Ramey and Tim Currey, as you can imagine all of these actors do an outstanding job with their roles and Elijah Wood actually voices Wirt one of the main characters, the rest of the voice cast may not be as well known but that doesn’t mean that they are short on talent, to be honest my favourite character in the show was Greg who was in fact voiced by a young boy called Collin Dean, in the past Collin has done voice work for Hotel Transylvania and he even played a small role in the 2015 Christmas movie Krampus.
Over the Garden Wall was a show that I held off from watching for a long time and now I really regret that decision, this is one of the greatest animated series I have ever had the pleasure of watching and I do hope that a second season is being considered, I understand that the majority of voice actors here are very busy but I wouldn’t mind watching a second series with completely new characters and even a brand new cast, if you haven’t see the show yet then stop reading this review and go watch it right now and I guarantee you wont regret it.
Thank you for reading this review of Over the Garden Wall
The June Zbox review is coming, due to an issue at Zavvi’s warehouse one of the items didn’t arrive until recently and therefore the boxes have been delayed to early July, once the box does arrive I will get the review out as soon as possible.
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